ISLAMABAD, Oct 3: The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) will collect about five water samples each from 132 villages of the federal capital and 1,164 villages of Rawalpindi to examine quality of drinking water.
These samples will be among 64,630 samples of water to be collected from 12,926 villages of 22 districts.
The National Assembly was told in a written statement on Friday that the PCRWR was launching a project at a cost of Rs38.7 million to check quality of drinking water.
Under this project, 25 low cost water conditioning and filtration plants would be installed in the four provinces and Azad Kashmir.
Similar samples would also be collected from Gujrat, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Multan, Bahawalpur, Lahore, Kasur, Sheikhupura, Sialkot, Sargodha, Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Quetta, Ziarat, Loralai, Khuzdar, Peshawar, Mardan and Mingora.
Out of Rs38.7 million, about Rs12 million would be spent on water conditioning plants, while the remaining amount would be spent on establishing water quality monitoring network, collection and analysis of water samples and establishing a water quality database.
Similarly, 25 filtration/conditioning units would be installed on the basis of the findings of water quality survey. These units would be installed and monitored by the PCRWR with the help of district governments and local communities.
Out of 25 units, two would be installed in the capital, eight in the Punjab, six in Sindh, three in Balochistan, three in the NWFP, two in Fata and one in Azad Kashmir.
To another question, the assembly was told that 2,200 government servants were declared surplus after the government adopted a policy of rightsizing/downsizing.
However, orders of absorption in different ministry divisions and departments of 1,658 were issued.
The cabinet, in its meeting of August 23, 2000, had constituted a Committee on Reconstructing and Rightsizing (CRR). The recommendations of the CRR were approved by the chief executive with a few modifications in a presentation.
The finance division has reported a saving of Rs2.4 billion after adoption of the policy. The services of no employee from the surplus pool has been terminated as the prime minister has directed not to dismiss any employee from the surplus pool. They will remain in the surplus pool till absorption elsewhere. However, those surplus employees who are willing to proceed on retirement are entitled to all admissible service benefits of leave, pension and gratuity under the normal rules.
It was told that Rs254.9 million had so far been allocated to the National Language Authority, which was set up on October 4, 1979 to switch over from English to Urdu and declare Urdu as the official language of the country.
The authority within two years of its establishment presented a comprehensive recommendations to the government in March 1981, suggesting that Urdu should be adopted as an official language within a period of three years in a phased programme.
These recommendations were also considered in the cabinet, but the then government decided to postpone implementation of these recommendations for certain political reasons. The cabinet division, however, issued instructions to all ministries and divisions of the federal and provincial governments to adopt Urdu language in offices in a phased way.