HYDERABAD, Oct 9: District Nazim Kanwar Naveed Jamil directed the officials concerned to ensure payment of dues to widows and heirs of the government employees without injuring their self-respect and said that a simple procedure has been evolved in this regard.

He was speaking at a ceremony to distribute benevolent cheques among the heirs of the deceased government employees at his secretariat here on Tuesday.

He said, for the future, a simple procedure has been evolved to protect the self-respect of the beneficiaries, who had to visit one or the other office daily to get their amount. He said, under the new procedure, separate accounts of the beneficiaries had been opened under which funds were automatically transferred to their personal accounts.

DCO Hyderabad, chairman district finance and planning committee, deputy district officer, human resources management and other officials of the district government were present on the occasion.

Mr Jamil said that it was due to the efforts of the district government that the benevolent funds, which had been held up since May 2006, have been released.

Not only this, he said, but the arrears to 2,800 heirs of the deceased, which had been held in abeyance, were also being distributed today.

PRISONS: District Nazim Kanwar Naveed Jamil said that the jails are not torture houses but reformatories where the people who had committed some crimes were kept for a fixed period of time and reformed to pass their future life as peaceful and law abiding citizens.