KARACHI: In the first project of its kind in the country for religious minorities, the Sindh government has started working on a plan to bring hundreds of worship places of non-Muslims under video surveillance across the province for their security and monitoring of their infrastructure, officials said on Tuesday.

The provincial government’s project has surfaced almost a week after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had assured religious minorities in the country in general and in Sindh in particular of “equal access to progress and development”.

“[Worship] places of four religious minorities — Christians, Hindus, Parsis and Sikhs — have been selected for the project,” said Athar Baloch, deputy director at the IT ministry that has designed and launched the project officially named “installation of security surveillance cameras at worship places of minorities.”

“There are hundreds of such places across the province and the plan is to bring all of them under video surveillance. For this, we are in the process of hiring an expert private company that would guide us in finalising the plan and its design. The project is expected to [be] completed within the next four months.”

However, he said, several such places of worship situated in far-flung areas of the province were not visited by devotees anymore. According to initial planning, he said, such abandoned worship places would not be made part of the project.

Last week while addressing a function organised by his part’s minority wing in connection with the Hindu festival of Holi in Karachi, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had said people of all faiths enjoyed equal rights according to the Constitution and no one would be allowed to create religious disharmony and instability in the country.

The PM’s speech and then the Sindh government’s initiative are believed to be moves from the two major parties before the general elections to win the hearts of thousands of non-Muslim citizens. But Dr Sikandar Ali Shoro, the special assistant to the chief minister on information, science and technology, told Dawn that the PPP had always been at the minorities’ side when it came to their rights and justice.

“This is not a new project, as it was planned before the beginning of the financial year [2016-17],” he claimed.

Published in Dawn, March 22nd, 2017