Punjab Minister for Labour and Manpower Raja Ashfaq Sarwar has said that the Punjab government was giving soft term small loans of Rs 10,000 to Rs 25,000 to industrial workers, labourers and their dependents, enabling them to do their small businesses with these loans.
He said the Punjab government had allocated a revolving Fund of Rs 500 million for these loans. The minister said the government was mobilising all available resources besides making sincere efforts and removing the unseen bureaucratic hurdles from the way of smooth provision of better educational, health and residential facilities and a better life style to the labourers and industrial workers.
Addressing the Sialkot business community and representatives of labour unions at the auditorium of Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI), the provincial minister added that the Punjab government was making all out sincere collective and individual efforts to promote the good working relationship between the employers and the employees, saying that the good mutual working relationship was direly needed to jazz up the pace of industrial activities in the factories and industrial units as well.
He alleged that the previous rulers adopted a sluggish and step-motherly treatment towards Punjab and they targeted the industrial base in Punjab through promoting the unbearable load shedding of electricity in Punjab, which was a great pity with the industries in Punjab, and this mounted load shedding also badly shattered the national economy.
Sarwar revealed that the prolonged perturbing problems of the labour and workers class would be resolved on priority, besides, pledging to ensure the early provision of R-5 Cards to industrial workers and labourers, saying that only 25,000 industrial workers out of total 42,856 possessed R-5 cards in Sialkot district at the moment.
He said that the labour department was providing better education facilities to as many as 4,000 children of the local industrial workers and labourers, of which 3,000 such children were getting education in Sialkot and 1,000 in Chawinda-Pasrur region.
Sarwar stressed upon the need of bringing further betterment in labour schools and social security hospitals across Punjab.
Provincial Minister also pledged to remove all the seen and unseen hurdles to ensure the early provision of marriage grant, death grant and educational scholarships to the children and dependents of the industrial workers and labourers in Sialkot district from the Workers’ Welfare Funds.
