LAHORE: The Punjab government highlights its achievements of 2020 and among them, the most prominent are making south Punjab secretariat functional, recruitment of doctors, launching the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development project and people’s assistance programme, constructing mother and child health hospitals, issuing health and medicine cards and other development programmes.

The Punjab government says the year 2020 was fateful for south Punjab as senior officials were posted in the South Punjab secretariat along with approval of the design of the secretariat building.

Up to 25,000 doctors and paramedics were recruited in the health department as well as recruitments of 10,000 police constables.

The PTI Punjab government also laid foundation stone of the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development project in Aug and 10 new shelter homes were established in Lahore to provide shelter to homeless and penurious segments of society.

The Punjab government says it offered financial aid worth Rs1.25 billion to 170,000 needy people under the chief minister’s Insaf Imdad Programme. The chief minister laid the foundation stone of mother & child hospital at Ganga Ram Hospital and local government academy and ensured completion of Lal Shehbaz Qalandar Underpass.

Setting aside past practices, Chief Minister Usman Buzdar presided over the board meetings of Rescue 1122 and other important institutions to take critical decisions for providing better services to the citizens. Meanwhile, the chief minister regularly held meetings with parliamentarians and consulted them for spearheading development agenda. He also chaired the apex committee meetings to monitor the corona as well as law and order situation.

The much-awaited Orange Line Metro Train was inaugurated in the month of October. Bab-e-Lahore was also inaugurated at Thokar Niaz Beg and the Insaf medicine card scheme was launched to provide free medicines to needy patients suffering from chronic diseases. Along with it, different development projects amounting to Rs140 billion were started in collaboration with the ADB in Sialkot and Sahiwal districts to improve the quality of life.

A Punjab government spokesman says the chief minister was regularly visiting different cities and towns and issued on the spot instructions for bringing improvement in different government offices, including hospitals, police stations jails, and shelter homes. He also visited Balochistan, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to promote inter-provincial harmony.

Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2021