Islamabad : Pensioners of Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited (formerly known as ADBP) have written to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to order increases in their pensioners frequently announced by the government from time to time which was stopped in 2016.
In a letter written through a former Vice President, ZTBL, Khalid Mahmood Aslam, old pensioners of ZTBL brought to the notice of the PM that from July 2016, they were drawing the same amount of pension without an increase of even one paisa.
According to them, the management of the Bank is treating the old pensioners like a “step brother” on one pretext or another.
Talking to The News, a pensioner Sabah Mufti said that in the last six years, hundreds of applications/representations were forwarded to the President ZTBL through PM Portal/Ministry of Finance, but all in vain. The Bank has only one lame excuse the Board of Directors of the Bank did not formulate a policy to allow increases in pension to the pensioners.
The pensioners argue that after the introduction of the Pension Scheme in the Bank vide circular dated 01.01.1978 (effective from 01.05.1977) the management of ZTBL kept on granting increases in pension to all the pensioners for 36 years from 1980 to 2016.
This clearly means that the policy to grant increases in pension is very much in the field.
Furthermore, under the direction of the Sindh High Court, the 10 per cent increases in pension from 2017 to 2019 were already allowed to the 10 petitioners who approached the court ignoring the remaining approximately 3000 pensioners.
The action of the Bank is a clear violation of Article 25 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which ensures equality before the law and equal protection of the law, the letter continues.
Referring to the current inflation rate in the country and the rise in the prices of commodities of daily use, the life of pensioners of ZTBL is getting worse day by day. The lives of widows of the pensioners are much more miserable as a majority of them are in receipt of a pension of less than Rs10,000 per month.
Some pensioners filed cases in different courts and are awaiting hearings of the cases for a long.
The pensioners have earnestly appealed to the Premier to intervene and ask ZTBL management to include increases in the last 6 years in the pension amount of the retired employees.