Pakistan Tanners Association (PTA) has appealed to the Punjab Chief Minister Mian Shahbaz Sharif to take immediate note of the DCO orders for closing every kind of leather hide and skin business within the municipal limits of Multan with immediate effect, otherwise strict action is warned off against the non-compliant.
PTA Central Chairman termed the DCO orders as irrational and apprehended that the orders could be for serving some vested interested. The meeting observed that the decision was baseless and took without consulting Multan leather business community. He said the city government Multan failed to attach any importance with the leather business which was the second largest export earner for the country. Without allocating an alternate business space, such order would only create panic in the business quarters but would also provoke unrest amongst them.
Multan based businessmen pointed out that all major hides and skins markets and godown in all cities including Lahore and Karachi are located in the urban populated areas so how and on what basis, a discriminatory order is passed for Multan only? Agha Saiddain said that most of the raw hide markets in Pakistan were working within cities without any problem. All those traders and industries have invested millions of rupees on infrastructure, thus an overnight order to roll back all the productive business activity is nothing but to harm a billion dollar earning export industry, he said, adding the step would break all supply chain of leather making industry which was already facing scarcity challenges of raw material, along with power and gas outages.