Bilawal to hand over keys of 1,024 flats to labourers today

Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Monday (today) will hand over to labourers the keys of 1,204 flats in Sukkur originally built for them, but last year they were used by the Sindh government to quarantine hundreds of pilgrims returning from Iran via Taftan at the start of the coronavirus emergency in the country.

Speaking in the Sindh Assembly last year to wind up a general debate in the house on the coronavirus emergency, Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah had termed the quarantine of hundreds of returning pilgrims from Taftan in Sukkur the only success story in Pakistan’s fight against the coronavirus spread in 2020. The CM had said that not a single death had been reported among the returning pilgrims from Taftan after they were quarantined in Sukkur despite the fact that many of them were infected with the coronavirus infection.

He had said the federal authorities had failed to discharge their obligations regarding proper and safe quarantining of the returning pilgrims at the Pakistan-Iran border in Taftan in order to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the country.

Talking to The News on Sunday, Labour and Education Minister Saeed Ghani said that the flats posed no health hazards to the labourers and their families who were going to assume their ownership as much time had passed since last year when the same residential facility was used as a quarantine centre in Sindh.

He said that due safety measures had been taken to sanitise the flats last year when the government had stopped using it as quarantine facility. Ghani said the allotment of the flats to the industrial workers in the province as being their original owners had been delayed due to the coronavirus emergency.

He said that another milestone the labour department would be achieved later this month was the issuance of a Benazir Mazdoor Card to 625,000 registered labourers in the province with the support of the National Database and Registration Authority.

He said that after Sindh, other provinces would follow suit and issue similar cards for proper registration of the workers and labourers to provide them with due facilities and privileges. He said the labour department was credited with adopting 16 laws to safeguard the rights and interests of the workers in the province.

The labour minister said that they would never accept the move of the federal government to privatise the Pakistan Steel Mills in Karachi as it would render many workers jobless.