PESHAWAR, Sept 9: Provincial government employees reaching the age of retirement in July 2010 and after will get pension from a special investment fund designed to grow so that it will partly take care of the annual pension bill after four years, it is learnt.
Anticipating a sharp increase in its pension bill by 2010 when a large number of employees recruited in the 1980s will retire, officials in mid ‘90s had worked out a strategy to fill the gap through means outside the budget.
Though the plan could not be implemented owing to the financial crisis that prevented the then government from investing funds in a savings scheme, the last military-backed civil government set up a ‘pension fund’ in 1998 to gradually enforce the strategy.
Officials said that by June 30 the present government in line with its predecessors had contributed about Rs2.5 billion to the pension fund.
Finance managers told Dawn that the pension fund would be strong enough to at least pay monthly pension to the employees retiring in July 2010. The fund will shortly touch Rs4 billion mark as it has recorded an income of about Rs1.4 billion so far through the profit earned since 1998.
There are over 300,000 provincial government employees. Of them 100,000 were recruited in the past four five years on the contract basis and thus they are not entitled to pension.
Officials said the government’s expenditure under the head of pension, which presently stood at Rs3.5 billion per annum, would grow substantially after four years when a large number of employees recruited in ‘80s would start retiring.
However, the finance managers said the situation would not harm the provincial kitty as the pension fund in the next four years would get stronger enough to take care of the increasing burden.
DATA: Meanwhile, the government recently compiled a data of its 85,000 retired employees to plug leakage of funds the exchequer has been experiencing because of the non-availability of record and mismanagement of funds on the part of banks.
The exercise reveals that in some instances employees recruited by the federal government are getting pension from the provincial account because no one referred their cases to the federal authorities when they retired while working on deputation in some provincial department.
In some other instances, the government has come to know that the pension of the dead employees is still being drawn.
