ISLAMABAD, January 3, 2022: The Provincial Assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) transacted half of its agenda and adopted three resolutions on Monday, observes Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) in its Daily Factsheet.

Following are key observations of the House proceedings during the 28th sitting of 20th session:

Members’ Participation

• The House met for an hour and 31 minutes.
• The sitting started at 03:04 pm against the scheduled time of 02:00 pm.
• The speaker presided over the entire proceedings.
• The deputy speaker did not attend the sitting.
• The leader of the House (chief minister) was not present.
• The opposition leader attended the entire sitting.
• As many as 41 MPAs (28 percent) were present at the outset and 59 (41 percent) at the adjournment of the sitting.
• Parliamentary leaders of all political parties were absent.
• Three out of four minority lawmakers attended the sitting.

 Output

• The House adopted three resolutions demanding the government to withdraw fuel price adjustment charges from electricity bills, finalize service structure of local government department’s employees and prepare centralized data of criminals involved in kidnapping of children. These resolutions were sponsored by PML-N, PTI and PPPP lawmakers respectively.
• The Minister for finance introduced the Khyber Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (Amendment) Bill, 202.
• Another bill – the KP Deserving Artists Welfare Endowment Fund Bill, 2021 – was deferred due to the absence of relevant minister.

Representation and Responsiveness 

• The House took up four out of seven starred questions while the remaining three questions were lapsed due to absence of relevant lawmakers. In addition, lawmakers asked four supplementary questions.
• An adjournment motion about missing fertilizer from the markets of Dera Ismail Khan was deferred due to the absence of relevant lawmaker.
• Ministers for housing responded to a calling attention notice regarding non-induction against 3000 posts in education department announced for merged districts of the province.
• Another CAN on the agenda was not taken up due to the absence of mover.
• Three lawmakers debated an adjournment motion for twenty minutes which was about adopting modern investigation techniques to trace the kidnapping cases.

Order and Institutionalization

• Two lawmakers spoke on points of order for six minutes.
• The House was adjourned to meet again on Tuesday, January 4, 2022 at 02:00 pm.

Transparency

• ‘Orders of the Day’ was available for the legislators, observers and the media.
• Attendance of the lawmakers was not available for the observers and the media.

This daily factsheet is based on direct observation of the KP Assembly proceedings conducted by the United Rural Development Organization (URDO) – a member organization of FAFEN. Errors and omissions excepted