SUKKUR: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari inaugurated a ‘Labour City’ here on Monday in Labour Colony. According to sources, 1,024 flats in the city would be given to workers from the Sindh labour department.

After the inauguration, Bilawal handed over allotment letters to over 30 labourers.

Speaking on the occasion, he said Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had given rights in the Constitution to labourers in Pakistan while Benazir Bhutto had started a stock option in factories for them.

He said the incumbent Sindh government started a labour policy in the province and made many labour laws for the rights of labourers under which they got rights to register themselves.

Bilawal said the PPP was working from the front for the rights of labourers when many government institutions were rendering them unemployed.

They were being removed from service in PIA, Radio Pakistan, Pakistan Steel Mills and other institutions, but the PPP stood by them.

He said he would soon inaugurate the Benazir Mazdoor Card Scheme and also devise a plan for building free-of-cost houses for the labourers across Sindh.

Slams federal govt

Before the general elections, “Imran Niazi” had announced to build houses for poor people and at that time, the PPP thought that by announcing the plan, he had “stolen” one part of Z.A. Bhutto’s manifesto. But Niazi planned houses by occupying islands for builders and industrialists to help make their black money white and not for the labourers, he said.

He said shelters/roofs of poor people were being snatched in the name of removing encroachments in Sukkur and Larkana.

The Niazi government was bent upon “snatching” the resources of Sindh, including natural gas and the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD) Karachi. If they “occupied” the NICVD, the facility of free medical treatment would be snatched from the poor people, he warned.

He said the PPP government “made” the NICVD, but they had damaged the health system in Punjab and KP. Now they were trying to damage the health system of Sindh, he claimed.

Bilawal also inaugurated a Children Emergency Satellite Centre in the Civil Hospital of Sukkur. Free-of-cost medical facilities would be available in the satellite centre consisting of 40 beds, he added.

He was accompanied by Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah, Information Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, PPP central information secretary Shazia Atta Marri, Sindh Transport Minister Awais Qadir Shah, Minister for Labour, Education and Literacy Saeed Ghani, Nisar Khuhro and others.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2021