Based on what I read from forums I am thinking to learn PHP or someother scripting language aswell as Perl itself may not be much useful as career option. Am I wrong here?

I've had fun and good payment while working on a Perl job, and got another attractive offer for a full time Perl programming job. So for me Perl was a good career move.

Whatever you learn will likely be good for your career - but it really depends on what you want to do in the long run.

I can't recommend any specific language to you, but I can point out that lots of glue technologies are also worth learning, and may even be more "universal": Whatever programming languages you write your web applications in, you will certainly benefit from a good knowledge of HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, security concepts like XSS and XSRF, and maybe things like SQL.