MULTAN: President of the Multan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) Mian Bakhtawar Tanveer welcomed the incorporation of “a significant number” of the chamber’s recommendations in the federal budget for FY-2025-26, describing the move as “a rare and encouraging gesture of consultative policymaking”.
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Speaking to reporters after an internal post-budget review, Mr Tanveer said the business community expected the new finance bill to be “largely pro-people”, provided the government met its ambitious revenue target without “further fuelling price pressures”.
He praised the government’s commitment to a phased reduction in electricity tariffs, arguing that lower energy costs would shore up a battered industrial base, generate employment and nudge the economy onto a growth trajectory.
Calling loss-making state-owned enterprises such as PIA “a millstone around the exchequer’s neck”, the MCCI chief urged Islamabad to show “visible seriousness” on privatisation and to accelerate right-sizing across the public sector.
Mr Tanveer said climate change had become an “existential economic threat”, and termed the budgetary allocations for mitigation and adaptation “a step in the right direction”.
While supporting the Benazir Income Support Programme, which last year consumed Rs594 billion, he warned that “leakages to ineligible beneficiaries” risked undermining macro-stability. “A tighter vetting regime is indispensable,” he insisted.
Applauding the government’s decision to raise the five-year IT export target from $3bn to $25bn, Mr. Tanveer said Pakistan’s 70 per cent youth bulge offered a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”. He proposed a roadmap to lift annual sectoral exports by at least $10bn.
He also appealed for incentives to encourage overseas Pakistanis to “repatriate skills and capital” rather than rely solely on remittances.
Warning that domestic cotton output had plummeted from 15 million to barely seven million bales, the MCCI president sought an “emergency agricultural package” to revive the crop and slash the import bill.
Mr. Tanveer welcomed the Special Investment Facilitation Council’s drive to court foreign direct investment and recommended channelling the bulk of the Rs1.186 trillion power subsidy towards export-oriented industries.
He cautioned that India’s upper-riparian water projects posed a strategic threat and demanded long-term budgetary commitments to hydropower dams and water conservation.
The chamber appreciated the higher income-tax threshold for salaried workers and the cut in the super-tax on corporates to 0.5 pc. It backed moves against non-filers but urged the Federal Board of Revenue not to “harass compliant traders”.
Zero-rating of fertilisers and pesticides was a “welcome relief” for farmers, Mr Tanveer said, but called for better enforcement against smuggling and tax evasion to widen the base without penalising the formal sector.
