LAHORE, Oct 17: Ms Nasim Lodhi, the minister for population welfare, is one of the few eloquent members of the Punjab cabinet. Her conversation is simply engaging, absorbing.

The entire Punjab Assembly, opposition benches in particular, looked sad as she was not present to answer questions about her portfolio on Monday. The opposition legislators felt more upset because they were afraid of losing a rare privilege of listening to the minister. This was probably the second time since the creation of the present assemblies that the legislators were getting a chance to know the marvellous achievements of the department which until recently was not liked by most people because of the nature of activities it carries out. In fact, the department prohibits people from doing what they love to do most.

However, with the back-breaking economic problems they have started heeding the advice of the department, although the rate of population growth is still going up with the increase in the budgetary allocations to lower it.

Last time when the performance of the population department had come under discussion, Ms Lodhi was only a beginner as a minister. And it was probably for this reason that she did not know how to answer questions, specially the supplementaries. When a member had shot a supplementary question to get elaborated the written answer provided by the department, the minister got nervous. She started turning pages of the file, without knowing that answers to such questions were not made available in written form and the minister has to use his or her own mind to cope with the situation.

But after that Ms Lodhi has improved a lot — and it was also the reason that the members wanted her to take questions.

When the first question was shot, the minister was not available in the house. Special Education Minister Qudsia Lodhi and Law Minister Raja Basharat immediately launched a search operation to trace the minister for population welfare. Although Agriculture Minister Arshad Lodhi was also present in the house and was in a better position to trace a fellow Lodhi, the law minister did not entrust him the task possibly because he was upset by the defeat of his son-in-law in a recent local election in Sahiwal and was lost in his own thoughts.

A hot pursuit by Raja and Qudsia soon bore fruit and Nasim Lodhi was in the house in a few minutes. Everybody looked very happy.

“I have just come from Batgram, the quake-affected area, and since it’s far away from here, I got late by a few minutes, explained Nasim Lodhi.

But the claim was immediately challenged by PPP’s Azma Bukhari, who never misses an opportunity to tease her counterparts on the treasury benches.

Azma said only a few minutes ago Lodhi was in the house and it was a white lie that she had come from a far-off place only to answer questions about her portfolio.

Ms Lodhi found herself in a more difficult situation than she might have experienced in Batgram when the legislators asked questions.

In our society, questions about population planning, the use of contraceptives, condoms and the IUDs are quite embarrassing, specially when the answers have to come from a female minister. Members were careful in their questions and the minister shared with them whatever information she had on the subject.

She told a member that previously a man undergoing the process of sterilization was paid Rs100 as incentive. And the woman got Rs75 for birth control for good.

But now the government had raised the reward to Rs250 to encourage the people to undergo the process. She said it was an achievement of the present government that it had raised the amount. She believed that now positive results would start coming in.

Legislators from both sides felt tempted and many said while talking to each other that they would certainly benefit from the scheme. Some said now people would be scrambling to get sterilized at the earliest — thanks to Ms Lodhi.

An interesting situation arose when an opposition member asked a question about the auction of some vehicles belonging to the population welfare department.

“We have some 8,000 female workers”, replied the minister. Nobody could understand the link between the auctionable vehicles and the number of female workers of the population welfare department.

Some MPs said after the adjournment of the session to Thursday morning that Ms Nasim Lodhi could better handle the portfolio of special education and the chief minister should seriously think of giving Qudsia Lodhi some other assignment.