Shaukat Ali, manager of a famous restaurant-chain in Islamabad, told Xinhua that this year the government stops dine in service and they are only allowed to operate in take-away and home delivery. Now the sales are less than 10 percent of the usual routine and 2 percent of normal Ramadan sale.

"People are not interested in Ramadan take away because of the disease outbreak, every coming day is worse than earlier for the people working in restaurant sector. We have 30 employees here, we did not lay off any fulltime employee yet, but daily wagers had to leave due to non-availability of work," Ali said.

"There used to be a crowd of customers during iftar every year, but now we receive very little orders for takeaway," the manager said, adding that "but if we open dine in service it will put the restaurant employees and visitors at risk too."

"We hope that there should be a policy for the restaurant sector to allow dining in of a limited number of customers, lest a large number of people will lose jobs," said the manager.

In a bid to provide direct financial assistance to the people losing jobs, in Ramadan and the following months, the government has extended outreach of its cash transfers to 12 million households from the existing five million, which were already getting financial support through different relief programs in the pre-COVID-19 time.

The country's Prime Minister Imran Khan has announced a 1.2 trillion-rupee-relief package (over 7.196 billion U.S. dollars) to support the poor and jobless and business sector. Under the government's scheme poor households have already started getting money by an easy registration process through mobile messages.

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