ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly Standing Committee on Communications directed the National Highway Authority (NHA) on Friday to maintain record of its assets and properties and computerise them.

The meeting, presided over by the committee’s chairman Sufyan Yousuf, also discussed some other issues related to the communications ministry, including variable toll tax levied on different routes and motorways.

Communications Secretary Khalid Masood, who has recently assumed the charge, was unable to answer questions put up by the members. He said that since he was new in the ministry he would be able to answer all the queries in the next meeting.

“Maintain all the record of the property possessed by the NHA, make them documented and digitalised,” the chairman said.

NHA spokesman Kashif Zaman said the authority had already started maintaining record of its properties and assets and computerising them on the directives of NHA Chairman Shahid Ashraf Tarar.

He said the NHA’s welfare wing had divided the assets and properties in four categories – buildings/offices, land/plots, machinery, and vehicles.

The NHA, he added, had already digitalised record of property and assets in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan despite facing problems, especially in troubled areas of the two provinces.

The spokesman said the exercise to collect data of NHA assets in Punjab, Sindh and Gilgit-Baltistan had started and it would be completed in two to three months.

Later, the standing committee discussed PSDP budgetary proposals for the financial year 2016-17 of the Ministry of Communications and its attached departments.

The demands for the ongoing and proposed projects of the National Highway and Motorway Police were discussed in detail. The committee recommended that priority be given to the projects of training institutes in Sindh and Balochistan. The committee approved the budgetary demands of National Transport Research Centre.

A calling-attention notice was submitted by Naeema Kishwer Khan and other MNAs about delay in the completion of Takht Bai overhead bridge. A sub-committee was constituted under the convenership of Sahibzada Tariqullah to visit the bridge site and submit suggestions to resolve the matter that has been delaying the construction work.

Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2016