KARACHI, May 17: City Nazim Syed Mustafa Kamal has enhanced the annual grant for Arts Council from Rs100,000 to Rs1,000,000. Presenting a cheque of one million rupees to the office-bearers of the Arts Council during a ceremony at its auditorium on Tuesday evening, Mustafa Kamal said that intellectuals were doing a great job for the city and therefore deserved encouragement.

“The youths of this city should be motivated to healthy activities before they are spoiled by indulging in uncivilised activities and the arts council could accomplish this task,” he added.

“We should promote our culture as the negative activities bring bad name for the city the world over,” he said.

Addressing the ceremony, Karachi University’s Vice-Chancellor Pirzada Qasim said the young leadership was always fresh and zealous. He said that those who loved city’s institutions gave practical demonstration. He said it was a good omen that the nazim wanted to build up a system.

Noted industrialist S.M. Munir said Korangi Industrial Area had been facing problems for the last 30 years, but no one paid attention to it. Many governors visited this area, but nothing came out concrete, he said.

“One day we heard that a young nazim is inspecting the area inundated in four-feet-deep water at 2.30am where after he immediately announced a special package on which work started immediately,” S.M. Munir said and added that they were all thankful to him for this.

Vice-President Arts Council Saifur Rehman Grami referred to their meeting with the nazim on the issues faced by Arts Council and said he immediately issued directives.

Arts Council Treasure Rizwan Ahmed said, “We had applied for this amount under the impression that even if the nazim would slash the amount, he would pay Rs0.5 million at minimum. But now we realised that if we had asked for a bigger amount, he would have given that much,” he said.—APP