Minister for Defence Production Rana Tanveer Hussain expressed his inability on Thursday to proceed with numerous vital projects of his ministry as a meeting with the prime minister has become an uphill task due to his tight schedule. He disclosed this while speaking in the National Assembly Standing Committee on Defence Production here in the parliament house.
Hussain said that his ministry wants to give a detailed briefing to the prime minister on different projects for his approval but the meeting is being delayed for several months on different pretexts. He also complained that officials of his ministry are transferred to other departments after every two years and this impacts the work negatively.
The minister said that his ministry has got all the capacity and capability to fulfil all the needs of the law enforcement agencies. "For the first time in the history of Pakistan, it has been decided that requirements of all the law enforcement agencies including guns, small arms and armoured personnel carriers would be met," he said.
After the Karachi airport incident, Pakistan Rangers has requested an APC and the engineers have started working on the project, he said. "We are building better JF-17 thunders than we imported from China," he claimed, saying that Pakistanis have talent but this needs to be channelized. The minister said that Pakistan has only one shipyard while China has more than 6,000 shipyards. "We can capture over 80 percent of the Gulf business by setting up better shipyards in Karachi and Balochistan," he said.
The ministry of ports and shipping is not cooperating with the ministry of defence production and getting all its vessels and equipments from other countries, the minister complained. "We have the capacity to fulfil all the requirements of the ports and shipping ministry," he said, adding that Chairman Ports and Shipping Authority is empowered to take all the decisions independently.
The minister also said that a separate defence production ministry has been carved out but it has been allocated no budget. "All the operations in the ministry are haphazard and this requires a lot of effort to streamline the whole system," he said. The ministry has decided to focus on exports of locally manufactured equipment and arms to generate revenue. "We have also decided to add a separate clause in all our future agreements with any country for technology transfer and joint ventures," he said. He said the ministry has been neglected in the past and no productive work has been done. "We have a good team and I am hopeful to generate a lot of revenue by selling our locally manufactured equipments to other countries," he said.
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