ISLAMABAD: Federal Finance Minister Miftah Ismail said on Wednesday that the Imran Khan government during its tenure of just three and half years had borrowed Rs20,000 billion loans.

Addressing a news conference at the National Press Club Islamabad today, the finance minister sought three months from the nation to fix everything. He also vowed to decrease inflation and said that the rupee depreciation would not be allowed against the dollar now.

He said that the price of sugar had been reduced to Rs70 per kg from Rs85. The minister said fiscal deficit remained Rs1,600 billion per annum on average during the last government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, while the Imran Khan led-government took this figure to around Rs5,600 billion. He said total debt of the country from 1947 to 2018 was Rs25,000 billion, whereas PTI government added Rs20,000 billion to this debt in just three and half years.

Regarding power outages in the country, the Finance Minister said power plants with a capacity of 7,500 megawatts of electricity were lying closed due to inaptness and incompetence of the previous government.

He said the government could reduce public sector development spending with other necessary budgetary discipline arrangements. He said the government would give a people-friendly and development-friendly budget despite all odds created by the PTI government. He expressed the hope that value of rupee would not slide further while the markets would also perform well.

He said the Pakistan Muslim League (N) had left growth rate at 6.1 percent which was reduced to 1.9 percent in first year of PTI government, negative one percent the following year and now this year the projection is 4 percent.

Miftah said the Consumer Price Index (CPI) based inflation has went up from 3.9 to 12.7 whereas the Sensitive Price Indicator has climbed to 17.3 percent adding that the rural inflation has witnessed more hike than urban one, which is unusual. He said, PML(N) left 2.3 percent food inflation which has gone upto 10 percent in the year and 14 percent in March.

Miftah said, the tax collection has also reduced from 11.1 percent of GDP to 9.1 percent whereas the debt which was Rs24,952.9 billion in PML(N) era has now risen to Rs42,735 billion till December 2021. He said when PML(N) took debt, the same utilized to build energy plants, road infrastructure, dams and education promotion, however, no such utilization was witnessed in PTI government.