Lahore, Pakistan’s finance secretary Muhammad Aurangzeb on Tuesday announced that the federal government has decided to cut the number of associated firms by half, scrapping 1, 50, 000 jobs, as part of a broad cost-cutting and performance travel.
” We are reducing the federal government’s length step by step. At a press conference, Aurangzeb outlined the administration’s plan to finish these changes by June 2025, noting that 80 departments have already been consolidated into 40.
He added that 60 % of vacant jobs have been abolished, which comes to 150, 000 federal jobs.
He claimed that a committee under the leadership of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, which was launching the right-sizing action in mid-2020, was intended to rationalize resources and improve performance.
According to the secretary, the council was to appear into 43 ministers and their superior agencies. He said that the national government’s monthly costs on these agencies was Rs900 billion.
He said that the six ministries that the government had initially selected for right-sizing included Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan, States and Frontier Regions ( SAFRON), IT and Telecom, Industries and Reproduction, National Health Services and Capital Development Authority ( CAD ).
He said that the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs, Gilgit-Baltistan and SAFRON are being merged and Bounder is being abolished.
According to the chancellor, in the second phase, out of the 60 superior organizations of the Ministry of Science and Technology, Commerce Division, Housing and Works, and National Food Security Research, 25 organizations may be abolished, 20 may get reduced in size and nine may be merged.
” We took four ministries in the second phase and after that, we have now taken five more ministries”, he said, adding that those selected for the third phase were ministries of federal education and professional education, information and television, energy sector, financing division, and national heritage and culture.
He said that work had been done over the past several years to reduce the size of the federal government, but” the problem was that if you wanted to do everything possible at once, it couldn’t be done, so we decided to do it gradually, in stages”.
The federal government plans to transfer hospitals to provincial governments, according to the minister. ” This is not just about cutting costs, it’s about improving efficiency”, he said.
The prime minister is scheduled to launch a new technology-related program in Karachi soon, according to Aurangzeb, who added that the plan was to shift Pakistan’s economic framework to an export-driven growth supported by technological initiatives and digitalization.
He claimed that Pakistan was at a promising economic juncture as a result of the government’s emphasis on macroeconomic stability and that the government’s focus on macroeconomic stability had contributed to the country’s improvement.
After the sharp increase in spending, controversy erupted, and questions were raised about the size of the Pakistani government.
The current administration has been taking steps to reduce the size and costs. It reduced the pension benefits for the current employees and ended the traditional pension system for government employees last year.
