ISLAMABAD, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Minister for Labor, Manpower and Overseas Pakistanis Ghulam Sarwar Khan on Thursday said the country has witnessed 1.2 percent decline in unemployment rate in the first half of the current fiscal year.

    The minister revealed this while giving details of the labor survey for the current fiscal year 2005-06 here on Thursday, Pakistan news agency APP reported.

    He said a record increase of 5.49 million has been observed in labor force for the first half of current fiscal year as compared to the same period of 2003-2004.

    According to him, the share of increased labor force for rural population was recorded 4.35 million whereas urban areas contributed 1.14 million labor force.

    He said that sustained efforts of the government have brought down unemployment level at 6.5 percent as compared to 7.7 percent for the last year. It shows the commitment on the part of the government to bring prosperity to the masses.

    Sarwar said that unemployed labor force was estimated 3.50 million in 2003-04, which has now decreased upto 3.33 million, so there has occurred 170,000 reduction in the unemployed labor force.

    This reduction in unemployed labor force was 80,000 for urban areas and 90,000 for rural areas, the minister said.

    He said that according to statistics there was 60 percent unemployment rate for rural areas, whereas 39.9 percent unemployment rate was recorded for urban areas. He said that 21.37million people attached with the agriculture construction sector and manufacturing sector, were the major areas where labor force had been employed.

    The manufacturing sector has added 690,000 jobs, the construction sector 380,000 jobs and agricultural sector has increased 3.285 million more jobs.

    The minister expressed the hope that due to continuous efforts of the government, unemployment would further go down in the days to come. Enditem