February 22, 2006	Wednesday	Muharram 23, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, Feb 21: The Senate standing committee on social welfare and special education will discuss irregularities in the Tawana Pakistan Programme (TPP) in its meeting here on Wednesday.

The Senate body has called former minister Dr Attiya Inayatullah to explain the import of substandard medicines under the TPP, sources told Dawn on Tuesday.

The sources said that in the last meeting in January, the members of the committee had expressed the desire to call the former minister to explain the ‘rationale’ of the TPP, which they said had “defied logic, economic sense and was without precedence.” Besides Dr Attiya, former secretary of the ministry Perveen Qadir Agha and some other officials had also been asked to attend the Wednesday’s meeting, they said.

The committee members, the source said, had also criticized the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) for not initiating any inquiry into the matter, saying that NAB was unmoved perhaps because of the “powerful connections of those people involved in the TPP scam.”

The Rs3.6-billion-TPP was approved in 2002 to be implemented for 54 months through the Aga Khan University (AKU), Pakistan Baitul Maal (PBM) and the National Implementation Unit (NIU) of the project. The TPP was aimed at improving the educational and nutritional status of some 0.53 million girls aged 5-12 years in over 5,000 primary schools in 29 poverty-ridden districts, including Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas.

One of the objectives of the programme was to “improve nutritional status of the girls through providing them with daily fresh cooked meals, administering of multi-micronutrients and de-worming medicines,” the TPP document says.

According to “the final report of the TPP”, prepared by a 15-member expert committee of the Ministry of Health, “the AKU being the technical adviser and implementer of the TPP, recommended the prescription plan and selected foreign brands of Albendazole tablets (de-worming medicine) and multi-micronutrient tablets.”

The official report confirms that “both the drugs were not registered for their import” by the health ministry. “The NIU imported the medicines through Unicef costing Rs9.25 million, out of the allocated funds of Rs387 million,” says the report. The opposition members in the Senate committee had also questioned the criteria for selection of the AKU as the implementer for the project.

It may be recalled that the TPP scam came to surface when over 100 school girls in Pak Pattan district complained stomach problems and vomiting after taking dozes of micro-nutrients and Albendazole tablets. Later, the distribution of the medicines was stopped in May 2003 by the Punjab health director-general, when the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Australia’s TGA Laboratory found them “substandard.”

The report reveals that the TPP management had purchased 12.32 million tablets of Multi-Micronutrients (MMN) and 280,000 tablets of Albendazole (deworming medicine) through Unicef. It shows that Albendazole tablets were imported from Cyprus while the MMN, containing 15 vitamins and minerals, primarily formulated for pregnant women, were bought from Denmark.

The bulk of the stock had been stored in sub-optimal condition at the district level for the past over two years” because of their non-utilization for its substandard quality side effects, the report said. The sources said the MMN expired in January, this year, while Albendazole tablets would expire in August 2007.

“Unicef and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended these MMN supplements to be used in pilot programmes among pregnant women in developing countries”, the report reveals.

Unicef also could not produce any evidence of its use for primary school children in any part of the world.

“The technical adviser of the TPP may be responsible for advising and promoting the use of these tablets for young primary school girls,” it adds.

The sources said the ministry of social welfare and special education had appointed Brig Sarfaraz, the managing-director of the Pakistan Baitul Mal (PBM), to conduct an inquiry into the scam, but the report had not been finalized yet.

One of the members of the Senate committee told Dawn that the services of the national project director, Dr Nasir Jalil, had already been terminated even before finalization of the inquiry and the committee definitely wanted to know as to why this had happened?

Moreover, the source told Dawn that these medicines remained at the Islamabad Airport for three months after its import as these were imported without acquiring an NOC (no objection certificate) from the health ministry. The airport authorities were paid over Rs0.6 million as damage charges, they said.