LAHORE: A listless and quorum-less session of the Punjab Assembly survived for only two hours on Friday, while the opposition was interested in continued proceedings the last hour was fixed for a debate on the price hike.

Though the opposidon had pressed for a debate on Wednesday when the its leader, Mian Mahmoodur Rashid, wanted to push for an out-of-turn resolution condemning imposition of the federal regulatory duty on hundreds of items, but it proved to be a dull affair as he was hardly prepared on the subject. Moreover, on Friday only 23 MPs were present in the assembly.

Instead of grilling the provincial government on price hike and quoting statistics to substantiate his claims, Rashid was content with reminding the treasury that it did not have an agriculture policy and berated it on shif ting of sugar mills to the southern part of the province.

`The Punjab government has made life difficult for the common man; everyone is now sinking in the sea of price hike. You name a vegetable and its price has gone beyond Rs100 a kilogramme. Even tomatoes are sold at Rs130 per kg. Price of onions has gone out of the common man`s fiscal reach. Until and unless the Punjab government has an agriculture policy, it cannot control prices of eatables,` he suggested.

On the regulatory duty, which originally triggered the debate, the opposition leader had one objection: `The federal government should have anticipated the situation at the time of budget announcement and slapped whatever duties it deemed necessary. Why come up withmini-budgets regularly, making a mockery of the entire budgetary exercise?` Minister for Industries, Commerce and Investment Sheikh Allauddin asked the opposition to come up with precise objections, even on items on which the regulatory duty was imposed. `Let us know where the duty is unjustified or would lead to a hike in price for the common man. If someone wants to consume apples from New Zealand or bananas from Ecuador,let them pay for it. Are these poor person`s items that the opposition is so sad at? If duty has been increased on imported vehicles above 3,000CC, how would it af fect the common man? All of us know how duties are imposed and why they are necessary to protect local industry and farmers. The opposition is trying to make an issue out of nothing,` he claimed.

Earlier, during the question hour Naeem Bhabha, the minister for agriculture, responding to a question by Raheela Anwer, claimed that there was no problem of water logging and salinity in Jhelum district.

Ms Anwer kept insisting she owned land and so did her colleague Nazar Gondal from the treasury, and that they had been suffering from salinity. `How can the minister simply deny the problem?` The minister, however, was in complete denial: `My department has told me so, which means there is no problem.` Things got settled only when the minister agreed to reassess the situation through a departmental survey. Ms Anwer, nevertheless, kept complaining: `Again, a survey by the same department, which denied the problem in the first place.

At the end, the session was adjourned till Monday af ternoon without concluding the debate on price hike before the opposition could get a chance to point out quorum.