Pensioners raise basic issues with finance secretary

Islamabad

President of Association for Welfare of Retired Person (AWRP) Manzoor Hussain who is retired auditor general of Pakistan along with senior aides of the association held a meeting with federal secretary fnance and briefed him about the problems which are needed to be addressed in the coming budget for the year 2017-18.

He called upon the Government to grant considerable increase in pensions of low grades employees keeping in view the sky rocketing inflation rate of necessary commodities. "Pensioners need numerous medicines due to old age ailments and the prices of essential drugs are very high there is a need to enhance the medical allowance frozen at the level of pension drawn in 2010 and only one time increase was given on it," he said.

Manzoor Hussain felt that the medical allowance should be de-frozen and be increased due to inflation every year. He also pointed out that the rate of increase given to pensioner should be at par with the serving employees as the impact of inflation is the same on both categories.

Manzoor Hussain highlighting the importance of pensioner’s identity card briefed the Federal Secretary that in the absence of pension book due to direct credit scheme in the banks is essential. He also drew the attention of Finance Secretary towards the family pension which is 75% of the pensioner and when calculated in the old formula it is merely 65-69% saying the contradiction should be removed and pension should also be raised to 100% as is awarded to the deceased family, when the employ died during the service.

Later on the AWRP president met the Accountant General Pakistan Hafiz Muhammad Tahir in the office of AGPR who accepted the demands in principle and promised to resolve them with the approval of the Finance Secretary.