CM aims to woo youth vote bank with Ujala scheme

Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif on Tuesday said that the worst energy crisis ever has made acquisition of knowledge extremely difficult for the younger generation. Presiding over a high-level meeting at Chief Minister’s Secretariat, Shahbaz said due to severe energy crisis, the agriculture and commerce industry as well as education, health and other social sectors are getting badly impacted. He said the students are facing a lot of difficulty and problems in acquiring education, due to power outages. He said that the Punjab government had chalked out a programme for free-of-cost solar lamps distribution among students of Matriculation and Intermediate, under the Ujala Programme which would soon be initiated. The CM said that electricity shortage has made the lives of the people miserable, ending commercial activities and rendering millions of workers jobless due to closure of industries. Similarly, he said, a negative impact has been registered on health and education sectors, as students are facing extreme difficulty in continuing their academic activities.
He said while Punjab government is expeditiously implementing alternative energy projects to overcome energy shortage, Ujala Programme is also being initiated to enable the builders of the future to continue their academic activities. He said solar lamps would be distributed, purely on merit basis and in a transparent manner among students of government educational institutions, enabling the younger generation to continue their studies, even during load shedding. He announced that over two hundred thousand solar lamps would be distributed throughout the province and all arrangements have been made in this connection.