Getting robbed and no complaints: KARACHI FILE
By A. B. S. Jafri
ONCE again the police are on the prowl. Not to catch a thief. They were never famous for any inclination to be on the lookout for thieves. With the Eid relentlessly drawing closer by the minute, they are out making hay, that is, raking in cash to have a happy Eid. If cash were raining from the skies, all would be welcome to take their pick. Our men in uniform are picking their stuff from fellow citizens’ pockets.
All Karachi newspapers confess being witness to this kind of activity for days. According to them the common sight on the busiest of busy roads is like this: You have a young man or two, a policeman or two, one or two motorcycles standing unpenitently by. This picture is animated by conversation. In the script the policemen dominate the dialogue that concludes only after the boys have managed to ‘please’ the officers.
So, the policemen’s happy Eid has begun and in full swing. Around three Ramazan weeks have gone by. Only one remains. Our police would be happy if the sacred Ramazan with its blessings came earlier, stayed longer. After another week or so Ramazan will have departed. But it will be back a year later. How nice to look forward to the next Ramazan and the next motorcycle documents check.
Few would disagree that the beauty of this comedy play is that it is so open. Everybody knows all there is to it. Would our genial Governor Mohammedmian Soomro be blissfully unaware of this straightforward activity of his policemen? Or, has our amiable IG of police no inkling of this great game in which his minions play the lead with such sang-froid?
Now a word to our good readers. Allah be praised that all of them are men and women of much education, culture and social consciousness. They are as well informed and conscious citizens as anywhere on this planet. How do they feel about this police diversion and its young victims, their own sons? Evidently, the parents of the boys harassed on the roadside in such crudely cynical fashion are quite comfortable. No complaints!
Witnessing such scenes and the dead silence suffusing them leaves one aghast. Citizens prefer to swallow it hook, line and sinker without feeling the pinch of this insult to themselves and to entire society. Not a whimper of a protest anywhere. You get this highway robbery, laced with humility, because you are willing to lap it up. So, rest assured you will have more of it. Do not fault the police. Fault the society that is willing to abide with this shame.
Let us now try to help ourselves to some more ways of looking at our environment. We are told over and over again that henceforth police will be under the vigilant eye of the elected local governments. The man that instantly comes to mind is the City Nazim Naimatullah Khan. It is said that he knows Karachi backwards — better than anyone going.
Is this Eidi cess by police part of his vast knowledge about Karachi or not? If the answer is yes, as it ought to be, what is he doing about it? We have no choice but to assume that he has his party cadres who helped him to his present eminence. Why not put these cadres to monitor this rampant extortion, and worse, this humiliation of our young people?
An elected government is all about public interest and the protection of it, or it is nothing, worse than nothing. If there is any one point on which this entire nation groans in one voice, it is the perception of the quality of police. Breathes there a Pakistani who does not know that police extortion comes in a hundred different forms, each uglier than the other?
Among those innocents we have our Governor, the Nazim, the IG and so many do-gooders around. There is no counting the pious and holy men who are training and dispatching our youth to Jihad a thousand miles away from home. They do not see evils right under their nose, or who knows, under their own patronage. Our Jihadis are more concerned about ‘Fuhashi’ and ‘Uryani,’ than stark corruption and cruelty
Just think of the wrongdoing with which this city is bursting at the seam. Police exaction is only one of a hundred evils that abound and flourish. Garbage and solid waste has not been attended to for years. The underground drains are fountains of sullage. Adulteration of food items, capped by over-charging, is something that touches every life. All this goes unnoticed by all our Maulanas who are pontificating from mosque loudspeakers all the time.
From the slaughter houses masses of meat is transported into town without the most ordinary precaution of a cover. A sight more hideous is impossible to imagine. No city father has eyes to see this. Food shop and vegetable stalls stand cheek by jowl with filth dumps. Flies, mosquitoes, indeed all manner of pests, proliferate in this city of mounting insanitation. Not a voice of protest from any Allama.
All this — and police Eidi, too!


BMC Hospital starts working after a long wait: DATELINE QUETTA
By Siddiq Baluch
THE Bolan Medical College complex is at long last complete. It is the only teaching hospital in Balochistan. It was a prestigious project of the federal government, initiated during the NAP rule in the province in 1972. It was supposed to be financed under the federally-funded Public Sector Development Programme.
Its initial cost was estimated at Rs75 million. The original site of the BMC complex was in Mastung. The first batch of students had agitated and convinced the NAP government of the need to build the college in the provincial capital. The original blueprint of the complex, approved by the NAP government, had proposed the site in the Sariab area of Quetta. Even the contract was awarded to the Masti Khan Construction Company of Karachi to build the complex at a cost of Rs75 million. When the NAP government was overthrown, the BMC complex project was politicized by successive governments in the province. The site was changed and the present one in the seismic zone was selected.
Now the present site is sandwiched between two huge Afghan refugee settlements of Kharotabad and Hazara Town. Thus over 70 per cent patients treated by the hospital are Afghan refugees. Its completion took three full decades. Its actual cost exceeded to Rs1.2 billion. Now it is operational at a big scale, though not fully and according to its capacity.
But it is the biggest health-care centre of the province by any standard. The government of Pakistan had imported equipment and machinery for the Dhaka Medical College in 1970. The machinery was diverted to Karachi during the peak days of the Bangladesh war and days before the fall of Dhaka.
Finally, the Indian troops occupied Bangladesh, and the machinery arrived at the Karachi port. Subsequently, the equipment and machinery were shared between the JPMC Karachi and the Bolan Medical College.
The cost escalation of the BMC complex had two specific reasons. One is normal rise in the cost of construction due to long delays, as the project took more than three decades, and the other and more obvious reason was the rampant corruption. Being a federally-funded project, its resources were diverted for buying loyalties of political opponents or for funding political campaigns of the loyalists in Balochistan.
Invariably, it remained a normal practice of the decision-makers in Islamabad to give minimum or no funds to Balochistan projects. That was why federal projects would take decades for completion. Some of them are still incomplete, though these were initiated some four decades ago. The BMC complex is a classic case. The cost of the project was first revised to Rs250 million in 1978 and in the second revision it was Rs1,193 million in 1990 and the third and final revision made it a Rs1.2 billion undertaking.
Newsmen keeping a track of the activities of the present government found the policy-makers nervous when they talked about the BMC or the project for widening the Pat Feeder. However, the present government used all its resources, power and influence to get the BMC complex completed and the hospital shifted. The governor, as well as the outgoing corps commander, took keen interest in the completion of the complex. A senior officer of the Pakistan army was virtually posted to ensure that the complex was completed and the provincial government Sandeman Hospital shifted and work started. Credit goes to Governor Justice Amirul Mulk Mengal who made frequent visits to ensure that the hospital was shifted and got all the necessary equipment for its smooth functioning.
At present, the hospital, with 800 beds, is fully operational. It is a teaching hospital with all modern facilities. It has almost all the important general and specialized wards to accommodate patients. It has 18 operation theatres, all in a row and properly planned, equipped with sophisticated equipment and machinery. When this correspondent visited the hospital, the gynaecology ward was made functional the same day and six delivery cases were handled, with mother and child in superb health. It has a complete pathology lab. The medical superintendent, Dr Shafi Zehri, told Dawn that it would be a complete lab with sophisticated equipment matching any well-reputed lab in Pakistan.
The hospital has an ICU with 14 beds and it is well-equipped. About 650 beds are allocated for the general wards and the remaining 150 for ICU and other specialised units. During the present emergency situation as a result of the Afghan war, the hospital management has made a provision of 400 beds for handling any disaster. It is a part of a contingency plan and disaster management by the BMC administrator in the wake of the Afghan war in our neighbourhood.
The process of installation of MRI and other modern equipment is on as the government of Balochistan has pledged to provide the necessary funds for equipping the hospital with all facilities. With the greater allocation for the social sector following the events of Afghanistan and conversion of loans into grant by friendly governments, the BMC is expected to get a bigger share from the enhanced funding. A number of projects are prepared and some others are processed for approval.
The BMC administrator, right from the beginning, has tried to benefit from the efficiency of the private sector. He has privatized most of the services, including cleaning, medical gasses, maintenance of power supply, plumbing, security, boiler, ventilation, heating, cooling and sewerage treatment. This has also helped the hospital to maintain an environment-friendly look: no dirt and no waste seen anywhere. The credit goes to the hospital administration for properly monitoring all the services round the clock.
It is the first hospital in the province where the sterilization process is centralized and a lift has linked the service with the operation theatres for proper handling of sterilized equipment and stuffs.

