The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is taking concrete steps to give maximum relief to the people and to reduce impacts of inflation on common man. Subsidy on wheat flour is one of those relief initia-tives, and the provincial government has allocated Rs. 15 billion in the budget of current financial year for subsidizing wheat flour whereas Rs. 10 billion had been spent on wheat subsidy during the last fiscal year.
This was told in a meeting of food department with Chief Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Mahmood Khan in the chair. The meeting discussed and re-viewed the overall performance of the department with special focus on the matters related to wheat subsidy and a strategy to meet the wheat require-ments of the province. The forum also discussed other reform initiatives including process of digi-talization in order to ensure transparency in the overall affairs of the department.
Provincial Minister for Food Atif Khan, Spe-cial Assistant to CM on Information Barrister Mu-hammad Ali Saif, Principal Secretary to CM Amjad Ali Khan, Secretary Food Mushtaq Ahmad, Secre-tary Information Technology Matiullah Khan and other concerned officials attended the meeting.
Briefing about the wheat requirements of the province, the forum was informed that 4.5 million metric ton wheat was the annual requirement of the province out of which 25% wheat was its own pro-duction and rest of 75% was being purchased from the government of Punjab and PASSCO. It was further informed that the overall mechanism related to purchase of wheat, its logistic, storage and supply to flour mills was being digitized in order to further streamline all the matters related to provide wheat flour to the people on subsidized rates. Talking on the occasion, the Chief Minister said that giving maximum relief to the people was one of the prior-ity areas of his government for which multiple relief initiatives were underway. He said that the provin-cial government was giving serious considerations to give significant relief to deserving households on basic food items in the upcoming budget.
