Up in arms: Govt urged to promote Punjabi

Protesters demand that Punjabi be used as the medium of instruction in schools at the primary level. PHOTO: ABID NAWAZ/EXPRESS
LAHORE: Dozens of students, teachers and members of Punjabi Parchar came together at a protest demonstration on Saturday in front of Lahore Press Club against the step-motherly treatment being meted out to Punjabi by the government.
The protesters called on the government to begin teaching the language at schools across the province. They urged the government to promote Punjabi. They held banners inscribed with slogans calling for the promotion of use of Punjabi. “The importance of mother tongue is recognised universally,” Punjabi Parchar president Ahmad Raza Punjabi said. He said Punjabi, on the other hand, had been languishing across all levels.  Addressing those present on the occasion, he said making mother tongue the medium of instruction across primary schools was the need of the hour. Punjabi alleged that the government had been deliberately striving to render the children of the province ignorant. He said the right to education in mother tongue was afforded in all other provinces. Punjabi said the government had failed to give the same right to the people of the province.
Other speakers on the occasion said the works of some of the great mystics of the nation were in Punjabi. They said youngsters were unaware of their works as the language had not been taught to them in schools. The protestors said they would stage a sit-in before the Provincial Assembly and fast onto death if they were not accorded the right.
They said Article 251 of the Constitution made it binding on provinces to take adequate steps to promote regional languages. The demonstrators said the government had not been fulfilling this constitutional obligation. They said it had also been repeatedly ignoring their pleas in this regard. Mazhar Tirmizi, Parveen Malik, Tariq Jatala, Farhad Iqbal, Diep Saeeda, Khalil Ojhla, Afzal Sahir, Jamil Ahmad Paul, Tauheed Ahmed Chattha and Bilal Kahloon were among those present on the occasion.
Curtsey:The Express Tribune, October 4th, 2015.

Indigenous technology: Fingerprint system to cover entire province

By Muhammad Shahzad 

DESIGN: NABEEL KHAN
LAHORE: 
City police have completed collating the fingerprint data of 0.7 million suspects nabbed over the last decade by using the Automated Fingerprint Information System formulated in collaboration with the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), The Express Tribune has learnt.
Crime Registration Office (CRO) SP Omar Riaz Cheema revealed that the scope of the project was being broadened to cover the entire province. He said data of 1.2 million suspects available with the Punjab Fingerprint Bureau was being added to the system. He said police had completed scanning 0.2 million of the fingerprints. Cheema said the remaining data would be added to the system in three months.
Hailing the system as a revolutionary initiative, the SP said its formulation had enabled police to identify suspects by employing indigenous automation technology. Cheema said little money had been spent on the initiative as the PITB had developed the software which had been installed on the department’s computers that were operated by employees. He said police had identified four suspects with criminal records and two with false identities to date by matching fingerprints collected from crime scenes with system records to date.
Cheema said CRO officials manually retrieved data from police records before scanning it. He said a rolling matcher, a gadget, was used to identify similar fingerprints. Cheema said latent fingerprints collected from any place could be matched with those present in the system to reveal criminal records in 10 to 15 minutes. He said a mega matcher, an advanced version of the aforementioned gadget, could do the same in 10 to 15 seconds.
The SP said police officials could also access the system by using applications especially developed for android phones. He said officials could further narrow down search results by accessing multiple categories that filtered suspects details’ in accordance with their physical attributes, particulars etc.
Cheema said the system had been primarily formulated to track movement of criminals and facilitate investigations. He said police had also been planning to equip staff manning pickets with portable biometric devices to identify suspects entering and exiting the metropolis by using the system. Cheema said police would be able to ascertain suspects’ criminal history by merely scanning their fingerprints on the devices.
Curtsey : The Express Tribune, September 20th, 2015.