Sirajul Haq terms Rs3,000 allowance for daily wagers insufficient

LAHORE:Jamaat Islami ameer Senator Sirajul Haq has rejected Rs 3,000 subsistence allowance announced by Prime Minister Imran Khan for the poor workers left without wages after lockdown.

“Prime Minister must tell the nation the strategy to make a poor family survive with Rs 3000, since had complained that he and his wife could not survive with Rs 200,000 per month,” he said while addressing a meeting of party’s district heads from Sindh and Punjab via online from Mansoorah on Wednesday.

Siraj demanded the PM that poor countrymen must not be put under more difficulties in the present tough times, and should be given enough allowance to have at least two meals and bare minimum necessities for survival.

He directed the party’s district heads to organise their welfare committees at street and mohalla levels, deliver rations to daily wage workers, and maintain liaison with local administrations for the purpose, besides involving the philanthropists in the welfare work.

He also appealed to the nation to observe Thursday as the night for collective prayers, while Friday as repentance and penitence day to seek the blessings of Almighty Allah to ward off this huge calamity.

Earlier, JI naib ameer Liaqat Baloch, while inspecting the Al-Khidmat camps for providing rations, medicines to deserving families, has lamented that the government was still trying to make political gains when the nation was trapped in a catastrophe threatening their lives.

Baloch told media that PM had reduced his political stature further during his address to nation and meeting with senior journalists. He said issue at hand was not 18th Amendment but the incompetence with which federal government dealt with this mega disaster.

He stressed that fruits of none of the government’s relief announcement had reached the common man so far who were forced to deal with coronavirus on self-help basis. He said government must eradicate all taxes, duties and levies on power, gas, petrol etc for three months.

He said according to global fall of oil prices, petrol price should have been reduced by at least Rs 35-40 per litre, but government was still making money out of the poor people at present hard times.

He said leadership of opposition parties played a positive, unanimous national role under the present troubled situation, the role which government should have played instead. He said PM Imran Khan was still not ready to come out of his obstinacy and arrogance, and badly failed again to create national unity on coronavirus, after his long list of failures on crises like Kashmir lockdown, Afghanistan, economic crunch etc. He warned that Imran Khan was pushing the state institutions to the wall with his solo flight attitude.