ISLAMABAD, June 3, 2021: The Provincial Assembly of Balochistan deferred question hour and four calling attention notices (CANs) due to absence of relevant ministers, says Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) in its Daily Factsheet on Thursday.

Following are key observations of the House proceedings during fourth and last sitting of 38th session:

Members’ Participation

• The House met for an hour and 45 minutes.
• The sitting started at 06:06 pm against the scheduled time of 04:00 pm.
• The speaker and deputy speaker did not attend the sitting.
• A member of panel of chairmen presided over the entire sitting.
• The leader of the house (chief minister) was not present.
• The leader of the opposition attended the entire sitting.
• As many as six (9 percent) legislators were present at the start and 11 (17 percent) at the end of the sitting.
• All three minority members were present.
• The parliamentary leaders of MMA, BNP-A, HDP, and PKMAP attended the sitting.

Output

The House adopted two resolutions demanding to declare Turbat city as dry port and shift dairy farms out of Quetta city. Seven lawmakers spoke on these resolutions for 46 minutes.

Representation and Responsiveness 

• The House deferred all seven questions on the agenda due to absence of Minister for local bodies.
• The House also deferred four CANs due to absence of Ministers for local bodies, public health engineering and services and general administration department (S&GAD).

Order and Institutionalization

• Four lawmakers spoke on points of order for 25 minutes about non-regularizing the services of community teachers and abduction of Baloch tribal leader from saryab road.
• A minority lawmaker and a woman on reserved seat protested for four minutes against the remarks of BNP-M lawmaker about members elected on reserved seats.
• The Session was prorogued sine die.

Transparency

• ‘List of Business’ was available to the legislators, observers and others.
• The attendance of lawmakers was available to the observers and media.

This daily factsheet is based on direct observation of the Balochistan Assembly proceedings conducted by Center for Peace and Development (CPD) – a member organization of FAFEN. Errors and omissions are excepted