PTI govt reluctant to get Peshawar BRT investigated

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government has opposed the formation of a committee to investigate the Peshawar Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project, Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) has reported.

As per the details, treasury members of the KP Assembly have opposed the opposition’s proposed suggestion to form a house committee to probe the long-pending project.

The chair, however, has admitted the question for a full debate under Rule 48 of Assembly Procedure, reports said.

“The government would not form a parliamentary committee unless it was aimed to facilitate people and provide them relief,” KP Law Minister Sultan Khan said on the floor of the provincial assembly during question hour.

He rejected the allegations of corruption in BRT and said that public funds had been utilised on the project in a “judicious and transparent” way.

The minister was responding to a question raised by Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) legislator Nighat Orakzai, who argued that public money had been “deliberately misused” in the project.

According to an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report released earlier this month, the KP government significantly deviated from the original, agreed design and used inferior quality material in the Rs70 billion Peshawar metro bus project putting lives and assets at risk in the process.

The inferior quality construction could damage the project’s reputation at the international level, warned the lender that had approved a $335 million (Rs53 billion) loan for the project in mid-2017.

PESHAWAR METRO:

The Peshawar metro is rather infamous for its incompletion as the authorities concerned have failed to meet deadlines time and again. The government has now issued yet another deadline for completion of the much-delayed project, saying that it will be operational by the end of current year.

The KP government and the project’s execution agency had earlier promised to open the project, launched in October 2017, within six months on April 20, 2018. However, the deadline was missed.

The project managers kept changing the launch dates from May 20 to June 30 to December 31 in 2018 to March 23, 2019. The project’s cost has also jumped to Rs68 billion from earlier Rs49 billion.