PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has received Rs1.57 billion of the Workers Welfare Fund from the federal government and the employees of Workers Welfare Board (WWB) will get their outstanding salaries for four months in a day or two.

Addressing a press conference at Peshawar Press Club on Tuesday, Provincial Minister for Labour and Manpower Anisa Zeb Tahirkheli said that the federal government had released Rs1.57 billion to her department, which was now processing salaries of its employees.

She said that the WWB employees were likely to get their salaries in a day or two. She said that they also owed around Rs3 billion funds to the federal government. She said that last time the federal government had released the funds in July.

The minister said that the provincial government had taken up the issue of funds delay with the federal government after which the first tranche of outstanding money had been released. She said that they had also written to the federal finance minister for releasing the amount, which was approved by the governing board of WWB.

She said that the delayin getting this amount had hampered work in the labour colonies besides causingdelay in payment of scholarships and issuance of marriage and death grants to the labourers and their families.

She said that there were 48 Working Folks Grammar Schools across the province where around 28,000 students were enrolled. She said that the teachers and students of these facilities were facing problems due to paucity of funds. She said that technical education and development projects as well as repair and maintenance work were also affected due to delay in releaseof funds.

Ms Tahirkhell said that projects nearing completion were also hit by delay in release of the funds. She said that Rs1.50 billion of the pending amount was meant for development projects. She said that they had also formed a rationalisation committee headed by an additional secretary to suggestbudgetary cuts to save money.

She claimed that the government was aware of all issues and would try its best that these schools were not closed. She said that there wereabout 66,000 secured labourers in the province. She said that the province had suffered badly due to insurgency as a large number of industrialists shifted to other provinces, dealing a blow to the KP`s economy.

A WWB official told Dawn that over 5,000 employees had not received their salaries for the past four months. He said that these employees would get their salaries for three months in a day or two and another one month salary at the start of January.