Punjab registers 76,000 mosques for imam honorarium, Rs 14.5bn paid so far

Punjab's Home Department has registered more than 76,000 mosques across the province and paid Rs 14.5 billion in honoraria to their imams so far under the Chief Minister's Imam Masjid Sahibaan Honorarium Programme, officials told the programme's fifth steering committee meeting on Tuesday, ProPakistani reported. The province sets aside more than Rs 20 billion a year for the scheme.

What the meeting decided

Provincial minister Khawaja Salman Rafique, who chairs the cabinet committee on law and order, led the meeting, and Home Secretary Dr Ahmad Javed Qazi briefed it. Officials said:

• registering the mosques was the hardest part, and it is now complete;
• geo-tagging of mosques is under way with help from district administrations;
• complaints through the online portal are being handled, and a chatbot is being added to answer imams' questions;
• the Bank of Punjab and the Punjab Information Technology Board were told to fix problems imams face with online applications.

Rule every imam should know

To keep the honorarium coming, an imam must make at least one transaction from the bank account every three months. An account left unused for longer can go dormant, and payments stop until it is reactivated. A single withdrawal or transfer in each quarter is enough.

What we do not know yet

The meeting did not publish the monthly amount per imam, the number of imams being paid or a district breakdown. If you run a mosque that is not yet registered, contact your deputy commissioner's office, which handles registration for the Home Department.

The honorarium counts as income; to see whether it brings anyone into the tax net alongside other earnings, use our income tax calculator. More Punjab government decisions are on our Pakistan desk.