Murad forms committee to look into ways to help daily-wage workers

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah has constituted a four-member committee which will look into the mechanism on how to assist the daily-wage workers and other deserving people during the lockdown in the province.
The committee is to be headed by Energy Minister Imtiaz Shaikh. It will have Special Assistants to CM Waqar Mehdi and Rashid Rabbani and Coordinator on
Social Sector Haris Gazdar as its members.
The committee in consultation with welfare organizations would take final decision on how to assist the affected people, whether to give them rations or cash.
The chief minister directed Imtiaz Shaikh to firm up his recommendations within the next two days so that the people could be supported in the shortest possible time.
The provincial government has already formed an application on which people in need of ration could send messages. If the application is approved then a four-digit helpline number would be advertised for the information of the people.
In this connection, the chief minister chaired a meeting with representatives of the welfare organizations to work out a joint plan to support the daily-wage workers and other deserving people who had been deprived of their livelihoods due to the lockdown.
The meeting was attended by Faisal Edhi of Edhi Trust, Ramzan Chippa, Shahzad Roi of Nai Zindagi, Shakil Dehlvi of Alamgir Trust, Zafar Abbas of JDC Foundation, Yousif Lakhani of Saylani Welfare Trust, Qazi Sadaruddin of Al-Khidmat Foundation, Hanif Motlani of Memon Federation and others.
The chief minister was assisted by provincial ministers Imtiaz Shaikh, Nasir Shah, Saeed Ghani (on video link), Advisor Law Murtaza Wahab, Chief Secretary Mumtaz Shah, IG Sindh Mushtaq Maher, Home Secretary Usman Chachar and Salman Shah of PDMA.
The chief minister told the meeting that he had been worried about the daily-wage workers and those who ran food stalls who had been affected by the lockdown.
"I want to support them for which a mechanism needs to be evolved," he said.
The chief minister discussed the mechanism of distribution of ration and disbursement of funds among the needy people with each and every head of welfare organizations.
Most of them said that the people should be provided ration for 15 days. Some of the participants were of the view that the distribution of ration was quite difficult job.
Some of the participants advised the chief minister to distribute cash among the deserving people so that they could purchase their groceries etc as per their requirement. The Zakat department has already a mechanism to distribute Guzara allowance among 200,000 deserving people.
CM releases Rs 314m to divisional administration: Sindh Chief Minister has released Rs 341 million to the divisional administrations for onward distribution among the district administration. The amount would be spent on administrative work and other expenditures being incurred on the care of pilgrims coming from different areas.