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ISLAMABAD, Aug 5: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said on Saturday that the government was committed to bringing qualitative improvement in the life of people through income-generating activities and the network of micro finance had been expanded to ensure that benefits of growth trickled down to the grass-roots level.
Talking to National Rural Support Programme Chairman Shoaib Sultan, the prime minister said that the NRSP was an important facet of the government’s policy to get the people out of the poverty net and improve their standard of living by providing them better facilities.
DRINKING WATER: Presiding over a meeting held to review the goals and targets of the environment ministry, the prime minister reiterated the government’s commitment to provide clean drinking water to every union council by 2007.
He asked the ministry to expedite implementation of the programme to ensure its timely completion.
He said water borne diseases were one of the major public health hazards and the government would spend about Rs7.5 billion on the Clean Drinking Water Programme.
The ministry was asked to focus on reduction of emissions of vehicles to bring them at par with the Euro Standards, operationalisation of the Clean Development Mechanism as per the Kyoto Protocol, preparation of an action plan for implementation of the National Environment Policy, reduction of industrial pollution and increasing forest cover through the National Afforestation Plan.
To keep the environment clean, all public transport will be converted to compressed natural gas and the environment ministry will prepare a plan in this respect.
The ministry was asked to expedite implementation of bio safety guidelines so that the country could benefit from the changes brought about by biotechnology, particularly in the health and agriculture sectors.
The Environment Protection Agency was directed to play a more effective role in the implementation of National Environment Policy and to increase coordination with other federal and provincial departments.
The meeting was informed that under phase-I of the Clean Drinking Water Programme, 554 water filtration plants had been installed in various parts of the country and 6,005 would be installed under phase II, for which a large number of sites had been selected.
