LARKANA, Nov 25: The trainees of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Youth Development Programme, receiving training under works and services development programme, took out a procession here on Tuesday to protest over non-payment of their stipends of four months.

Carrying banners and placards, the protesters converged on Suekarno Memorial in Lahori Mohalla. They staged a sit-in and interrupted vehicular traffic after burning tyres.

They alleged that right from August 2008, when they had joined the training programme till today, they had not received monthly stipends.

Brushing aside the claim of local PPP leaders, they said that they (PPP leaders) should desist from issuing unfounded statements about their regularity. They said instead of 90 per cent mandatory attendance at training programme, they had 99 per cent on their roll.

The trainees in the department were drawn from Larkana, Qambar-Shahdadkot and Dadu districts, they said and added that they had to travel over 70 kilometres from some districts to attend the training.

There are around 675 trainees in Larkana cluster comprising three districts and the programme managers had so far released stipends to 188 trainees while the payment of remaining trainees was under process, official sources said.

One of the reasons for the delay was non-attendance of certain trainees while the main hurdle was lack of cooperation by National Bank of Pakistan in opening bank accounts of trainees, sources said.

The district government had made arrangements after coordinating with the regional chief of NBP and obtained over 500 new account opening forms so as to complete formalities for opening bank accounts of all the trainees so that provincial government could remit their stipends in their bank accounts.

If government had made appropriate arrangements for making payments then they would not have been compelled to come on the roads, they said.

They appealed the top PPP leadership to intervene and ensure early payment of their stipends due from August 2008.