ISLAMABAD: When poor driver Abdul Jabbar rushed his baby son to a Peshawar hospital with a hole in the heart, he was told there was no specialised children’s unit to treat him. Instead he was forced to sell his truck to pay for private surgery in Rawalpindi.
He is one of hundreds of parents forced to take their gravely sick children to clinics outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa because the provincial government has failed to build a hospital specially for the children.
Yesterday the provincial government was accused of withholding millions of rupees in federal funds to build Peshawar’s first dedicated children’s infirmary.
The federal finance division has given more than 80 million rupees to the KP government for the Khyber Institute of Child Health and Children’s Hospital in the last six months but the same has not been spent fully on construction. The hospital had been due to open in 2013 but will now be completed until June 2017 at the earliest – parents will have to continue taking their children to hospitals hours away for at least another 18 months.
The hospital is just one of 46 finance department-backed projects throughout Pakistan whose funds have been effectively withheld by provincial government officials. They include adult hospitals, schools, water supply and road projects. In some cases provincial officials have failed to request funds already approved by the finance division.
According to the Planning Commission only 26 million of 526 million rupees handed over for schools, hospitals and other development projects in the first quarter of 2015-16 has actually been spent.
Abdul Jabbar, whose only son is now 13, said he was forced to sell his truck to pay 450,000 rupees for heart surgery at Rawalpindi’s National Institute for Heart Diseases (NIHD).
“I wandered for the last 12 years for my kid’s treatment but I was not able to get him treatment in KP as there was no children’s hospital there,” he said.
Last night, four KP children were being treated there in the hospital because specialist paediatric services were not available in their province. The father of a four month old girl, also suffering from a Ventricular Septal Defect, said he had been forced to sell land to pay for her treatment. “I took my daughter to the Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar but after seeing what was happening to the other kids I brought her to Rawalpindi and sold my land for the treatment,” he said.
The federal government must share some of the blame for their plight, the Planning Commission said last month. It criticised the finance division for delays in passing on development funds to provincial governments – failed to release any funds during 2013-14, only 5.75 per cent of the annual allocation of 9.4 billion had been passed on in the first quarter. In a letter to provincial officials, the finance division demanded an explanation for the “sluggish demand and utilisation for allocated funding for Public Sector Development Projects (PSDP),” official sources said.
The release of funds by the finance division improved slightly in the second quarter but is still below 20 per cent of the annual allocation – 20 per cent below expected. Twenty percent funds of the PSDP should be released in each of the first two quarters followed by two allocations of 30 per cent. A total of Rs 1.7 billion of 9.4 billion was released by the end of the second quarter, the official said.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is one of the worst performers, officials said. It has spent only 17 per cent of funds awarded for 170 federal-backed projects in the first six months.
The slow release and utilisation of funds during first quarter has hampered work on development schemes and will ultimately increase the cost of these projects.
The finance division believes the provinces are to blame for not demanding development funds because without their request the money cannot be transferred.
KP’s Information Minister Mushtaq Ghani said that each and every project, including the children’s hospital, will be completed on time. Work on KP’s 170 federally-funded schemes is now picking up, he said, and the remaining 83 per cent of its PSDP budget will be spent before the end of the fiscal year. The province’s health minister was not available for comment.
Maula Bukhsh Chandio, an adviser to the Sindh chief minister, rejected finance department’s claims that provincial governments were failing to demand PSDP funds. The federal government was to blame for obstructing payments, he said.