PESHAWAR: Govt adopts policy to solve Problems of refugees
Bureau Report
PESHAWAR, Nov 14: The NWFP Governor, Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, has said that the NWFP government has adopted two-pronged policy to resolve the Afghan DPs’ problem, secure the right of local people and to provide relief to the Afghan refugees.
The governor called upon the international community to provide assistance to the Afghan refugees on humanitarian grounds.
He was talking to a Norwegian delegation led by Minister for development and cooperation at the Governor’s House on Tuesday.
The governor said that two million refugees were staying in the NWFP that had put further burden on the economy and infrastructure of the province.
For this purpose, the NWFP government is devising a strategy to minimize the burden on the social infrastructure and other facilities of the province, he added. The negotiations for establishing camps for the fresh refugees had been finalized with the UNHCR, however, so far no camp had been set up to accommodate the fresh arrivals.
The governor said areas had been indicated where arrangements could be made for the setting up of refugees camps. However, he said the UNHCR failed to even put a single camp on ground where the freshly arrived refugees could be accommodated.
Referring to the resources available to the provincial government, the governor said that our province was a cash-starved province. It looks to the federal government for 92 per cent of its revenues.
He said the NWFP was also a food deficient province and overcame this deficiency by providing subsidy on wheat cultivation. This cost the exchequer Rs3 billion which should have been diverted to some development activities.
He said that the government was trying to raise the female literacy rate because the existing mess in our society was because of lack of education. He said in the health sector the government had strengthened tertiary medicare and now the secondary medicare facility would be strengthened to ensure efficient health delivery system at the district level.
He said a massive restructuring of the provincial governments had been made.
The Norwegian minister for development said that her country was engaged in the uplift of developing societies. She said Pakistan was faced with a severe problem and her government wanted to engage the governments of Pakistan and the NWFP in some sort of substantial financial cooperation to reduce its burden.
She said that her government would do whatever it could for the welfare of the people of the NWFP and also it would help the NWFP government in looking after the externally displaced Afghans.
