ISLAMABAD - Terming the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s 100-day plan, if voted to power, highly unrealistic and a pack of contradictions, Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal said that Imran Khan was just befooling the masses and his plan was nothing but an election gimmick.
Addressing a press conference here at Punjab House on Tuesday, Iqbal, who was flanked by Finance Minister Miftah Ismail and Adviser to Prime Minister Haroon Akhtar Federal, claimed that the 100 days plan of the PTI was actually a stolen concept of Vision 2025 given by the PML-N government. “But it has been done in so crude and is contrary to ground realities, it turned into a laughing stock for them instead of giving any boost to the party,” he said.
The interior minister said that how the PTI would take forward such an ambitious plan when it had badly failed to implement its 90 days plan given by it after forming the government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in 2103.
Iqbal said that the people of Pakistan knew it well who had actually served their cause and would reject such “imposters and charlatans” in the upcoming general election.
He said that his party’s government had promised to eradicate energy crisis, extremism and improve the economy, which it fulfilled.
“We added 10,000 megawatts of electricity to the national grid in the past five years, eradicated the scourge of terrorism and brought peace to Karachi and Balochistan.”
“The GDP growth rate, before our government, stood at 3 percent but now, it stands at 5 percent,” he said.
In a lighter vein, he dubbed Imran Khan as commander of “NATO,” which he said stands for “No Action, Talk Only.”
Iqbal said that three parties stand in the court of people who can assess their performance where they have been in power.
“Elections are won on the basis of performance, not mere presentation,” he said and added that there seemed to be a contest between two parties only – one “presentation party and the second performance party”. Miftah Ismail tearing apart the PTI’s 100 days plan on technical grounds, said that where did the money come from for such an ambitious and impracticable plan and obviously the tax-payers would shoulder such a massive economic burden.
He said that the creation of a new province in south Punjab, which is one of the promises made by the PTI, would tentatively cost around Rs50 billion while the creation of 10 million jobs, as claimed by the PTI, would cost approximately Rs140 billion.
The slash down in energy cost would again be putting an extra burden of Rs55 billion on the national kitty, he said.
The PTI had also announced an incentive package of Rs100 billion for exports, the finance minister said that the total expenditure would be around Rs1600 billion "which means that in the next five years, Imran Khan would spend Rs8 trillion more than the government is spending right now".
"Right now, the outstanding debt of the federal government is Rs27 trillion. It would increase to Rs45 trillion [if PTI's plan is implemented]," Ismail said.
"The GDP deficit will increase by four percent per year," the finance minister claimed. "Currently, the debt-to-GDP ratio is 4.9 percent, which would rise to 8.9 percent in Khan's era. As you can imagine, this will lead to inflation and raise prices."