Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Saturday said the pro-growth budget of the government reflected its vision for a prosperous and developed Pakistan. Complimenting Minister for Finance Ishaq Dar, he said the minister and his team deserved the appreciation for presenting a pro-growth budget for fiscal year 2016-17. The Prime Minister said in the past three years, the government did work tirelessly to improve the lives of the average Pakistani citizen and stabilize a nation that was in tatters.
"We inherited hyper-inflation and financial indiscipline of the highest degree, inhibiting the working class from living lives of dignity, and turned things around to cut our deficit by half, grow the GDP at a 4.7% per-annum rate, improve our balance of trade, bring inflation down to a ten-year low and bring tax collection up to historic levels," a press release from the PM media wing on Saturday quoted the Prime Minister as saying. The Prime Minister observed that none of these could have been possible if the budget had not mirrored their vision for the country and the vast potential it had.
In the next fiscal year, the government was committed to not only replicating this success, but one-up it, he added. He said the government has chosen to invest in Gwadar, a port with increasing international importance with China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on the horizon. "We have created new subsidies and public investment in agriculture to help our agro-economy and the millions of Pakistanis who depend on its success for a living," he said.
The Prime Minister said the government had also committed to investing in infrastructure, roads, railways and the Karachi-Lahore motorway, connecting the nation and creating thousands of direct and indirect jobs. He said after the Paris climate change agreement, they committed to recognizing the existential threat it posed to the security and the future of our children. The government had been investing over a billion rupees in the Climate Change Division 'to make sure we don't gamble with the future of the world.'
The Prime Minister further said the government did increase the allocations in social welfare cash grants programmes like BISP, to make sure that millions of poor people, regardless of their income, can have lives of dignity and break the shackles of poverty. "Finally, we have also invested in numerous power projects across the country to develop a country where livelihoods are no longer dependent on the whims of power outages." He reiterated the government was achieving success by finding solutions to problems, faced by the country with its development plans.