Pakistan has to match China speed on CPEC: PML-N

Lahore: Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) has said that Pakistan has to match China’s speed on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

PML-N Secretary General Ahsan Iqbal maintained the PML-N had brought the CPEC,

“Pakistan is struggling to match the speed of development as that of China. The PML-N silenced its critics by completing projects worth $29 billion in just four years,” he said, citing the previous government led by the PML-N.

Speaking at a news conference, he said the international financial institutions such as PricewaterhouseCoopers had predicted that if Pakistan continued on its trajectory, it would be in the top 20 economies by 2030, which was an endorsement of the PML-N’s Vision 2025.

But he recalled finance minister Shaukat Tarin had himself said this four months ago that the decision of devaluing the rupee by over 30 percent and increasing the key policy rate to 14 percent crashed the national economy.

Iqbal, a former planning minister said, “Not just this, [the] PML-N also met its short-term planning and medium-term planning goals. It sets out a target of (Pakistani) Rs 3 trillion public sector development programme in over five years and overshot that by Rs 200 billion. The party built 2,000km of motorways, doubled investment in the energy sector. But this government could not even operationalise the projects PML-N had already planned out and were ready to go, including the CPEC ML1 project, Karachi Quetta and Peshawar Circular Railways.”

He said that the the Planning Commission, which made Vision 2025 and other plans and not through its scrutiny, saved the nation over Rs700 billion.

“I challenge Shaukat Tarin to bring a better plan than the Vision 2025 by [the] Planning Commission under PML-N. We did not just make the best plan with the consensus and efforts of over 1,000 individuals but had everyone onboard, including [the] PPP government in Sindh, PTI government in KP and Dr Malik’s government in Balochistan. We did not only plan it all but executed it to completion. Mr Tarin must visit the website of the Planning Commission and learn how it is done! Because the truth is that [the] PTI government has zero planning to run the state on a day-to-day basis, which was catastrophic for the country.”

Ahsan Iqbal also lamented Tarin’s statement that the PML-N installed needless additional electricity and the government had to make capacity payments. This capacity was installed according to a growth rate projection of 6 per cent, he claimed.

The PML-N secretary-general said this government shrank the volume of the country’s economy by almost US $100 billion by its devaluation.

Ahsan Iqbal said that Shaukat Tarin must read his party’s Vision 2025 and learn how it is done.

He said the PML-N had introduced the idea of Vision 2010 in 1997, which clearly pointed out that Pakistan will face acute energy shortage if new power plants are not installed..

But, he said when the PML-N set out to make Pakistan one of the 25 fastest growing economies of the world in 2013 many laughed at it, saying how would that be possible with 13 hours/day power outages. Over the past 68 years, Pakistan installed only 18,000MW, but the PML-N installed an additional 11,000MW capacity in its five-year tenure, he said.