January 25, 2007	Thursday	Muharram 05, 1428

KARACHI, Jan 24: A three-member delegation of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) led by Clifford Craig, chief technical adviser visited Port Qasim on Wednesday and held meeting with the chairman PQA Vice-Admiral Asad Qureshi.

In a briefing the PQA chief informed the delegation that the port has adopted a matrix policy towards increasing port efficiency and reducing cost of doing business. As a result of this, he said port activity has increased rapidly to cater to the needs of growing economic activity in the country.

Since exports to US are increasing the PQA, he said, has allocated ten acres of land for IC3 programme, out of which five acres would be utilised for installation of scanning equipments and rest of the land to be reserved for containers stacking yard.

The UNODC consists of the UN International Drug Control Programme and the UN Centre for International Crime Prevention and are focused to enhance the capacity of the UN to control drug trafficking and also prevent international terrorism in its all forms.

The scanning project of the PQA will help to prevent the use of containers for transportation of banned items such as arms, radio active materials and narcotics to the US.

The IC3 programme envisages joint screening of the US-bound containerised cargo from Pakistan via live video link by customs authorities of Pakistan and the US. This will also reduce the cost of exports to US and will save time for shipment of cargo to the US.