F.P. Report
KARACHI: Sindh Labour and Human Resources Minister Saeed Ghani Monday said the next elected mayor of Karachi would belong to Pakistan People’s Party. He added that the Sindh government has been striving hard to build the city while Karachiites also do have trust in the PPP.
While speaking in the ongoing budget session of the Sindh Assembly today, the provincial Labour Minister said the Sindh government had spent billions of rupees in the past few years to carry out development works in the city.
Saeed Ghani, who is also the PPP Karachi chapter President, said the Sindh government had carried out development works in such areas of Karachi where none of the elected public representatives including the MNAs, MPAs, and UC Chairmen belonged to the PPP.
He said that owing to its constant public service the PPP had polled more votes in the recently held by-elections in Karachi as compared to the votes secured by the People’s Party in the general elections from 2008 to 2018. In contrast, those who earlier used to get millions of votes from the city had now secured a few thousand votes from Karachi, he said.
The provincial Labour Minister said that he didn’t agree with the notion earlier expressed by a concerned lawmaker in the house that Karachi was counted among the cities of the world having the worst living conditions.
He said that bloodshed had been occurring in Karachi almost 15 to 20 years back but in the present day, the provincial capital had been providing livelihood, business, and educational opportunities to the people and their families coming to the city from other provinces. Ghani said that nobody left Karachi for other provinces as instead people from other provinces came to the city for job opportunities.
He clarified that a baseless allegation had been levelled in the house that the Sindh government in the new budget had merely allocated Rs 10 billion for the development of Karachi. In fact, the Sindh government has allocated total of Rs 125 billion for carrying out development works in the city.
He said that this allocation included Rs 60 billion for the ongoing schemes while Rs 19.3 billion had been reserved for new development projects in the city. While Rs 40.7 billion has been allocated for the foreign-funded development schemes for Karachi. Ghani told the house that the Sindh government’s Education Department had recruited 47,000 teachers as 10,000 of these jobs had been given to applicants belonging to Karachi at the level of union committees.
He said that these teachers had been hired purely on the meritorious ground through a transparent recruitment procedure.
He informed the concerned MPAs that affairs related to the subject of labour had not been completely devolved to the provinces by the federal government despite the adoption of the 18th Constitutional Amendment several years back. He said the federal government had still been retaining the affairs of the Workers’ Welfare Fund and Employees Old-Age Benefits Institution as hopefully this issue would soon be resolved after it had been raised before Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Ghani recalled that Sindh had become the first province to set Rs 25,000 as the minimum monthly wage for the labourers in the province later on the new federal government had followed suit and made a similar announcement for the rest of the country.
He told the concerned lawmakers that the services of the National Database and Registration Authority had been contracted to speed up the process of issuance of Benazir Mazdoor Cards (BMCs) to the labourers in the province. The Sindh Labour Minister said that in the first phase over 600,000 registered labourers were being issued the BMCs as in the second and third stage the same cards would be issued to the unregistered and self-employed workers in the province.
