ISLAMABAD: A total of 16 billion rupees was provided to the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) as cash support by the federal government, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs informed the Senate on Friday.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Sheikh Aftab Ahmed told the Upper House of Parliament that the government too is closely watching the performance of national carrier and has already taken steps to make the organisation a profitable one, according to a report published on the Radio Pakistan website,

Read: PIA records Rs2.8bn profit in first quarter of this year

Apart from the 16 billion rupee cash support, another 52 million rupees were spent on the acquisition of 15 air crafts on dry lease, said the Minister in reply to a question raised by a senator.

Also read: 35 flights cancelled; PIA management, pilots blame each other for crisis

Aftab Ahmed stated that flight operations on routes bringing in losses were halted and profitable international and domestic flight routes were introduced.

The Minister while replying to another question also informed the senators that at least 26 million unverified (Subscriber Identification Modules) SIMs were blocked since the start of verification process for mobile phone SIMs across the country.

Related: 25m unverified SIMs blocked

The telecom operators — Mobilink, Ufone, Telenor, Warid and Zong — launched biometric verification of prepaid SIMs on Jan 13 on the directives of the government.

The number of mobile phone subscribers in the country is around 140m. Up to 10 per cent of them are post-paid connections which were excluded from the re-verification process because their data was already with the cellular companies.