LAHORE: Special children are the future of Pakistan and there should be programmes for their training and education.

This was a crux of speeches delivered at the Lahore Businessmen Association for the Rehabilitation of Disabled (Labard) Mela 2015 for Special Children held at Jilani Park on Thursday.

Acting Governor Rana Muhammad Iqbal, Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Ijaz A Mumtaz, Labard President MNA Pervaiz Malik and others spoke on the occasion.

More than 5,000 special children from various institutions took part in activities at the Labard Mela. The festival was held to encourage the special persons to progress in life and make them useful citizens of society.

The physically challenged enjoyed the festival as many games and cultural activities were arranged for them and many of them performed at the stage, as well. Each special person was given a present containing some gifts and eateries.

The acting governor, speaking on the occasion, said bright future was the destiny of only those nations that looked after their distressed segments enabling them to play their part in economic development. He expressed pleasure that Lahore businessmen were fulfilling their social corporate responsibility by ensuring that special children of the city were provided with proper education and vocational training so that they could join the mainstream economic activities.

Labard President Pervaiz Malik said over 10pc population of all developing countries consisted of special persons that needed to be taken care of by the rest of the 90pc in the larger interests of society. He said everyone should cooperate with the organisations like Labard as around 200,000 physically challenged people were awaiting help in the suburbs of Lahore.

The MNA said the poor could not afford sending their physically challenged children to schools and colleges because of high cost of daily transportation, adding Labard had school vans for all its 500 students.

“We train them in skill, encourage them to go for higher education and ensure their placement in respectable jobs” he added.

He said many girls that were severely affected by polio were encouraged to do MBA or even for higher education and their educational expenses and daily transportation arrangement were funded by Labard.

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2015

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