Former SC judge urges senior citizens to help charitable education programmes

Justice (retd) Mushir Alam has said the senior citizens of Pakistan are under an obligation to lend all-out support to the charitable efforts being made in the country to educate children of underprivileged families.

The former judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan expressed these remarks as he visited the Korangi campus of the non-profit Green Crescent Trust (GCT). Justice (retd) Alam appreciated the continuing efforts of the GCT to enrol out-of-school children in Sindh for the past 27 years.

He said that after his retirement from the judicial service, he was fully available to support the bona fide non-profits like the GCT to further their cause to educate children belonging to needy families. He urged the educated youth and senior citizens to spare time to voluntarily work for such charities in order to help them speedily achieve their noble cause in society.

The retired judge underlined the need to evolve a system to properly train volunteers associated with the charities in Pakistan much like the training system in vogue for the paramedics. He said he had envisioned that after his retirement, he would establish a voluntary organisation where the concerned citizens like him could combine their efforts to support efforts being made to rehabilitate special children and minors whose families lived below the poverty line.

He appealed to the public to come forward and fully support such work in the education sector. Speaking on the occasion, GCT Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Zahid Saeed said the platform of his charitable organisation was fully available to the honourable retired justice to fulfil his dream to establish a voluntary organisation for deserving children. He added that the GCT had been running a network of over 150 charitable schools in remote and least developed areas of Sindh, having an enrollment of 29,000 students. He explained that of those 29,000 students, 1,800 were orphans and an extensive programme was being run to support them.

Saeed said that the GCT had also managed water projects in over 1,200 villages of Thar. He added that the GCT also aimed to establish over 250 charitable schools with enrollment of over 100,000 deserving students in Sindh under its Vision 2025.