Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister (SAPM) on Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development (OPHRD) Sayed Zulfikar Abbas Bukhari on Sunday said that effort were afoot to amend the Employees Old-Age Benefits Institution’s (EOBI) laws for for inclusion of the informal workers in its pension net.
The OPHRD ministry would present an ordinance before the federal cabinet in the coming days to bring majority of the country’s informal employment under the government’s pension scheme, the SAPM told an online session hosted by the Corporate Pakistan Group (CPG) and Nutshell Group on social networking sites such as FaceBook and Twitter. He said the ordinance, once approved, would also enable the overseas Pakistani workers to become registered pensioners through submission of self-contributions to the EOBI. Zulfikar Bukhari told the forum that revenue generation of the EOBI had surged significantly as its structural flaws were rectified completely during the two and half year tenure of the present government.
“When our government took over, the monthly pension amount was stood at Rs 5,250; within about 18 months, we took that up to Rs 8,500, with a 62 per cent increase ,” he maintained. The SAPM said his goal was to bring the monthly pension of EOBI pensioners at par with minimum wage by improving the organization’s assets that had been dormant for the past 15 years and worth trillions of rupees. Highlighting the present government’s pro-expatriates initiatives, he said before the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government came into the power, only blue-collar workers were considered under the OPHRD ministry domain.
Now it had been changed as all overseas Pakistanis including the citizens of second and third generations of Pakistani origin families were taken care of by the ministry, he added. He said prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the OPHRD ministry set a record by sending around a million people abroad for the various job assignments.
