Sikh Marriage Bill tabled in Punjab Assembly

LAHORE: Punjab Assembly session on Friday once again failed to complete its agenda and remained unable to meet the quorum.

The quorum was pointed out by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf legislator Dr Murad Raas on which chief whip of PML-N, Rana Arshed criticised the Opposition.

Rana Arshed stated that it had been decided in the Business Advisory Committee meeting that quorum wouldn’t be pointed out in the question-hour session but it seemed that Opposition was on a different agenda.

The only business which took place on Friday was laying of the report related to the Sikh Marriage Bill by PML-N MPA Ramesh Singh Arora. The Bill would be the part of agenda next week.

Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan adjourned the proceedings until Monday. Dr Nausheen Hamid, the PTI legislator, Friday submitted a call attention notice over the incident related to a death of citizen in the Sabzazar area due to kite twine.

Foreign scholars: The Punjab Information Technology Board and the Punjab Archives and Libraries Department (S&GAD) in collaboration with Columbia University's Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities are holding a seminar on 'Knowledge Architectures and Archives,' on March 12 and March 13, 2018.

The seminar will be inaugurated by PITB Chairman Dr Umar Saif along with Punjab Additional Chief Secretary Umar Rasool at the thrid floor of Arfa Software Technology Park. The scholars from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and Oxford universities will also participante in the event.

The seminar will bring together the scholars from the world's leading universities for two days of discussion, deliberation and action on the nature and role of knowledge in the modern world, the importance and use of archives, and application of technology in bringing together different strands of knowledge and information together.

It will be curtain-raiser to the Digitisation of the Punjab Archives project which aims to open the great repository for greater public use. Under the project, hundreds of thousands of pages of the documents from the Mughal era to the post-colonial period will be scanned, catalogued, annotated and made available to the general public on a specially designed portal. The project will enable the scholars to engage with more local sources and give a fillip to research on Pakistan. The Punjab Archives are one of the largest archives in South Asia, and span a period of over 300 years with documents ranging from the British India, to Princely India, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Nepal, Central Asia and China.