ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research, Syed Fakhar Imam, on Friday emphasized that the youth in the country should be imparted proper education and skills for enabling them to play their due role in the advancement of the national economy.

He said the companies whose profits maximized during the last one year and earned billions of rupees were under the obligation to increase their spending for the progress and uplift of the backward areas. He expressed these views while speaking at the 14th Annual International CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Summit and Awards-2022 organized by the National Forum for Environment and Health (NFEH).

About the initiatives of the present government to revolutionize the agricultural sector, he said the present government extended utmost support to the corporate sector entities doing efforts and spending their resources for the uplift of the downtrodden communities. He said Prime Minister Imran Khan also fully understood the importance of CSR owing to his extensive social welfare work in the fields of education and health.

Speaking at the Summit, Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, Farrukh Habib eulogized the philanthropic services of the companies in the far-flung areas of the country that did not have the basic necessities of life and infrastructure to carry out such work.

He said the present government initiated its Ehsaas flagship programme to implement its vision to transform Pakistan into a welfare state. He informed the audience of the programme that a massive allocation of Rs260 billion had been reserved to carry out work related to 34 different initiatives related to the Ehsaas programme.

Farrukh Habib said a major initiative of the Ehsaas programme stood for providing 92,000 scholarships to the students of deserving families to get higher education in the public sector universities. He said the universal health insurance coverage was another major drive of the present government to fulfill the basic needs of the people.

He said the present government has the intention to establish a centralized hub for letting the corporate organizations combine their resources and work together to carry out the uplift work in the sectors that urgently deserve development.

He said holding the CSR summit by assembling under one roof representatives of leading companies was one major step towards providing a common forum to different key players in the corporate sector to connect with each other and strive collectively for the shared social uplift goals for the betterment of the society.

The Minister of State said that human resource development and capacity building of the youth should be one major area of focus by the corporate sector for doing CSR-related work. Speaking on the occasion, Federal Minister for Railways Azam Khan Swati, appreciated the efforts of the corporate sector to serve humanity at large and lessen the miseries of the underprivileged communities.

He said the work of the corporate organizations in the areas of health, education, environmental protection, and other social sector deserved special praise. He said the corporate entities through their CSR drive had become a partner with the present government’s drive to transform the lives of common people.

Swati said the present government had initiated the drive to improve the working of Railways in accordance with the principles of the corporate sector so to ensure the welfare of the railway workers and their families. Chairman of National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA), Tauseef H Farooqi, said the drive launched by the NEPRA encouraged the power sector companies to invest Rs4.5 billion as part of their CSR-related obligations.

He said the CSR activities by the power sector companies had benefited 13.7 million people, created 24,000 jobs through 390 different welfare projects. He said due to the efforts of the NEPRA every power distribution company had now a separate HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment) Department for ensuring the safety of their employees. Naeem Qureshi, NFEH President, in his welcome speech, said that his non-governmental organizations had been extensively doing tree plantation drives as a partner of the Clean and Green Pakistan campaign of the present government.