LAHORE: Several minority rights activists on Wednesday held a demonstration in front of the Lahore Press Club demanding the prime minister allocate a quota for minorities in the Prime Minister’s Youth Loan Scheme.
The demonstration was organised by the Punjab Lok Sujag, a partner organisation of the Right to Expression, Association, Assembly and Thought Network, and the Human Rights Defenders’ Committee. The protest began at around 3pm. Several minority representatives and civil society activists joined the protest.
The protesters held up banners and placards and chanted slogans demanding a quota for minorities in the scheme. The participants complained that the government had failed to implement the quota for the employment of minorities in the public sector.
They said the government must reserve a quota for minorities in the loan scheme and relax the terms for them to empower minority youths. The participants said the government must also implement the 5 per cent employment quota for minorities at the federal and provincial levels.
Punjab Lok Sujag Programme Coordinator Rizwan Safdar said quotas were meant to help bring marginalised sections of the society into the mainstream. He said the Constitution provided for the reservation of quotas for equitable political representation. Safdar said in 2007 the federal government had issued a notification reserving 5 per cent jobs in the federal government for minorities. The notification has delivered very little in terms of its goals, he said. Yet, he said, the notification was a step in the right direction. “We assumed that the notification would apply to all state sponsored/owned enterprises despite its procedural flaws,” Safdar said. “But to our utter dismay, the federal government failed at every level to implement it.” None of the provincial governments have taken concrete steps to implement the quota either, he said.
Dr Kanwal Feroz said the federal government had announced the Prime Minister’s Youth Loan Scheme last year and invited applications from unemployed youth so they could be granted subsidised loans. While there is a 50 per cent quota for women entrepreneurs, the scheme entirely neglects minorities. Feroz requested the government to announce a quota for minorities in the loan scheme right away so that marginalised segments of the society could benefit from it as well.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 9th, 2014.