Pervaiz asks MPAs to help alleviate poverty

Staff Report

LAHORE: Parliamentarians should play their role effectively to alleviate poverty and reduce public problems, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, the Punjab chief minister, during a meeting of the Pakistan Muslim League and its allies at his residence on Thursday.

The chief minister said that the Punjab Assembly had made many legislations during the last two years, adding that the majority of the laws were aimed at improving public welfare.

He added that the parliament would soon pass a bill to solve the promotion problems of government employees. Another bill, he said, would grant the King Edward Medical College university status.

The chief minister said he hoped that a government project to improve livestock would bring about revolutionary changes in rural areas and said that the government was formulating a scheme to distribute loans worth Rs two billion among cattle ranchers to yield more milk and meat and improve the marketing of these products.

He said that loans to purchase milk-producing animals ranged from Rs 50,000 to Rs 500,000, adding that Pakistan was the fifth biggest milk producer in the world. But he lamented that only four percent of Punjab’s milk went through processing whereas the remaining 96 percent was sold loose causing a lose of 40 percent of the milk. He said the government had decided to set up milk processing plants in Punjab to save the milk lose.

He asked the PML parliamentarians, local councils’ representatives and the party’s office-bearers to prepare themselves for the local council elections in 2005 as they would have a major affect on the next general elections.

Elahi said that the government’s environment project would run in five major cities of Punjab during its initial stage and only four-stroke vehicles, using CNG would be allowed public transport route permits.

He said the government had set up the Green Fund in the Planning and Development Department to provide interest-free loans to rickshaw and diesel bus owners to ease their financial burdens.

Elahi said that the government had taken a revolutionary step in announcing the dissolution of the Muslim Students Federation to purge the education sector of politics. He thanked Punjab Assembly members in making President Pervez Musharraf’s Gujrat visit successful, adding the assembly would work until the 2007 elections.

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