LAHORE: The Child Protection & Welfare Bureau in Punjab on Wednesday reunited with their respective families six lost children belonging to Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

One Afghan child, Abdullah, would be reunited with his family through the Foreign Office as his family has been traced in Afghanistan.

Moving scenes were witnessed on the occasion as Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif, who was chief guest of the ceremony, escorted each child to his parents. He thanked the Sindh and KP governments for cooperating with the Bureau for the reunions.

He also lauded performance of the Bureau and promised it a good chunk of funds in the next budget to advance the cause. Through efforts of the Bureau and other relevant Punjab departments, he said, fears and rumours about kidnapping of children for organ trade had been removed.

The bureau chairperson, Saba Sadiq, told the audience that the institution recovered 7,000 lost or abused children and reunite them with their families every year. She said the centres of the Bureau in 13 districts were ready to be formally made functional.

Earlier speaking at the Punjab Education Endowment Fund (PEEF) ceremony, the chief minister described it as the biggest initiative in the history of South Asia as more than 0.175 million less privileged but talented students from all over the country are being equipped with education through it.

Scholarships worth Rs7.5 billion have so far been distributed on merit through the income of Rs17.5 billion endowment fund. He said had such an educational fund been set up 70 years ago, no child would have remained deprived of education and billions of youth would have been playing their due role in national development.

He said the PEEF dispelled the perception that higher and quality education was the right of elites only.

The chief minister said his government had continued work on development projects through thick and thin ignoring all obstacles created by so-called proponents of change. “In 2014, when Pakistan had started its way forward and was making progress, unnecessary sit-ins tried to halt the system resulting in a setback to the economy,” he said.

“I shudder at the thought that had they (the opposition) succeeded in their lockdown plan, the CPEC project would have stopped causing an irreparable loss to the country,” he said.

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2017