MULTAN, Nov 3:Villagers from Muzaffargarh district have spoken out against the“highhandedness” an NGO that lends micro loans to them.
Speaking at a press conference here on Sunday, they accused the Punjab Rural Support Programme (PRSP) of charging high rate of interest, resorting to harassment and making fake entries to exploit the poor in the name of ‘changing their fortune’.
Tracing history of what they termed their bankruptcy, Nazar Husain Rawal, Manzoor Husain and Muhammad Yasin told newsmen that the PRSP established its office in their district in 1998 and selected the village of Noor Kubarra to launch its micro credit scheme.
Poor villagers who were living a life on or below the poverty line were immediately attracted by the ‘green pastures’ shown by the PRSP credit teams notwithstanding the high rate of interest. The male borrowers were forced to constitute women’s organizations in their respective areas if they wanted the loan.
But the high interest rate and diminishing agricultural incomes landed them into a vicious cycle of taking more loans to pay the previous ones while under the PRSP pressure they had to show profits in their returns in order to be eligible for the next tranche of the loan.
Moreover, the villagers alleged, the PRSP officials started defrauding them by recording less payments in their accounts against the payments they made to them (PRSP officials). In case of delay in the payment of loan installment, the NGO officials would take with them the livestock of the defaulters and if one did not posses any valuable, he was put behind bars with the backing of police and revenue department.
They urged the government to save them from this exploitation and bind the NGO to deal them fairly instead of becoming ‘Lala Ji’s shop’. They demanded interest waive-off against the loans they took from the PRSP.
A few days ago scores of the villagers had held a protest demonstration against the PRSP in front of the Multan Press Club. When contacted, no one was available to give the PRSP version due to the weekly holiday on Sunday.
MURDER: A man stabbed to death his estranged wife and her mother near Shujabad on Saturday night over a domestic dispute.
Zarina had been living with her parents in Basti Shahpur for the last several months after developing differences with husband Muhammad Abbas.
On Saturday, Abbas came to his in-laws house and asked Zarina to come along with him. When she refused, the accused started stabbing her while her mother Faiza Mai also sustained injuries in her bid to rescue her daughter. Both died on the spot. The accused managed to escape.
Shujabad Sadar police have registered a case.
MTR: The Multan Telecommunication Region (MTR) has achieved 100 per cent revenue target during the fiscal year 2001-2002.
According to MTR general manager Azad Bakhat Khan, the region’s target of Rs 3400m had been successfully met at the end of the year. The revenue target during the ongoing financial year was Rs 3850m.
He said 318 telephone exchanges were working in MTR which comprised former divisions of Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan. Of them, as many as 268 were digital. The internet facility was available at 147 digital exchanges of the region.
The MTR GM said some 291,617 telephone lines were working in the region against the provision of 355,468. He announced that during the current year the MTR would install 84 new exchanges having 38,400 telephone lines while the overall target to commission new telephone lines during the current fiscal was 51,000.
To a question, he defended the shifting of ‘17’ inquiry to Lahore. He said the PTCL had spent millions of rupees to establish a central inquiry system in Lahore which had enabled the subscribers of Multan, Lahore, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Sialkot and 13 other cities to get telephone numbers of some 2m subscribers of these cities through a toll-free call at 17 from anywhere.
He said PTCL had started preparing itself for the free market mechanism and for this the thrust was being laid on customer care. He said to improve voice quality not even the urban but the rural areas were also being connected to the modern optical fibre system in the MTR.