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| June 17, 2007 | Sunday | Jumadi-us-Sani 01, 1428 |
Tackling extremism
Curbing medical malpractice
Questions about new electoral rolls
THE Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has started displaying the draft of the fresh computerised electoral rolls in the country for inspection by the public. The process of display and receiving of complaints and applications for additions will continue up to July 3, 2007.
WHILE presenting the Sindh budget to the provincial assembly, Senior Minister for Health and Coordination Sardar Ahmad lamented that the province continued to face massive human and infrastructural development problems. It is ironical that the situation has not changed much after billions have been injected into the provincial economy. Thus the Rs236bn Sindh budget for 2007-08 registers a rise of 16 per cent over the revised estimates for 2006-07. It appears that the problem is not just one of mobilising finances for major projects. Mr Ahmad subtly identified some factors that have a multiplier effect, though he did not describe them as such. A major one is poverty which is linked to social underdevelopment. Poverty reduction needs more sociological understanding and economic skills than have been displayed so far. Another factor is the heavy debt the province is burdened with and the inelasticity of its taxation base that limits the flexibility of the provincial exchequer. The problems are daunting and some of them, such as the state of law and order, corruption, lack of planning and poor governance found no mention in the budget speech.
Many of these problems, however, distort the budget priorities. Take the case of revenue receipts which will go up from Rs157.1bn in 2006-07 to Rs176.6bn in 2007-08 — an increase of 12 per cent. But the bulk of the increase will be in the Federal Tax Assignments. The province manages to generate barely less than 15 per cent of its revenue income. It continues to be tied to the apron strings of Islamabad with all the political implications that it has. Another worrying factor is the growing dependence on foreign loans which only tie the country to the industrialised world inhibiting our ability to make independent choices. Given this state of revenues, it is not surprising that the budget shows a deficit of Rs12bn leaving the government little flexibility in drawing up its expenses. For 2007-08 the bulk of the revenue expenditure has been allocated for the administration, that is, Rs26bn (15.8 per cent), social services Rs23bn (13.8 per cent), and law and order Rs19.1bn (11.4 per cent). Given the high inflation rate, this will barely keep the government machinery, the health and education delivery systems and the police and courts running at the same level of inefficiency at which they have been operating for years. The local governments will however receive a hefty amount of Rs72bn — an increase of 28 per cent over the current year.
If there has to be an improvement in the life of the people of Sindh, there is a need to improve governance and step up the pace of development which must be carefully planned and be people-centric. The province will spend Rs40bn from its own funds on the Annual Development Programme in the coming year. If the federal grants and foreign assistance are included, the development outlay will exceed Rs71bn, provided no cuts are made in the course of the year. The thrust of the new ADP is towards improving the communication sector (Rs7.6bn) with agriculture coming next (Rs3.5bn). The social sector is not the favoured one — education and health get only Rs2.5bn and Rs1.2bn respectively. With the Pakistan Economic Survey not giving any province-wise breakdown of economic development, one can only guess what Sindh actually needs. It will be a good idea if the provincial government publishes its own economic survey annually.
FRIDAY’S disclosure by the Sindh government that the man who blew himself up at the Sunni Tehrik’s religious gathering in Karachi’s Nishtar Park in April last year — killing 57 and injuring scores —belonged to a banned extremist group leaves one with cold feet. It is also a reminder that simply banning extremist groups and organisations will not make them disappear or their activities to stop. Police probe into the suicide bombing reveals that the group behind the dastardly act had planned the crime sitting hundreds of miles away in a Frontier town before executing it in Karachi. The motive given out by arrested accomplices involved in the massacre was sectarian intolerance. The killer belonged to a sub-sect of the puritan variety akin to one practised by the Taliban, which does not allow for any interpretation of religion at variance with its own. The target was a rival religious party whose top leadership and many activists were killed in the attack.
Unfortunately, there have been far too many suicide bombings and armed attacks carried out by indoctrinated men in recent years. All such murderous assaults have been prompted by hate and intolerance or by political animosities. The targets have often been well known personalities, including the president, the prime minister, the interior and other ministers, religious leaders, scholars, a former corps commander and, most recently in Quetta, soldiers of the Pakistan Army. All this leaves one to marvel at the consistent failure of the many intelligence agencies which have failed to preempt such strikes. The threat posed by religious extremism, whether home-grown or inspired by Al Qaeda, to society and public order cannot be more pronounced. The authorities’ inaction against elements that have openly indulged in spreading intolerance and threatening to enforce an extremist version of the faith, whether they be Islamabad’s Lal Masjid clerics or those behind the encroaching Talibanisation in parts of the Frontier province, has emboldened such anarchist forces to challenge the writ of the state. It is time the government cracked down harder on such elements to put an end to this form of insanity in the name of Islam.
SO abysmal is the state of healthcare in the country that it does not come as a surprise that a midwife, posing as a doctor, made a mess of the surgery conducted on a girl referred to her for abdominal pain. The patient was subsequently brought to a private medical facility in Naushahro Feroze where her condition was pronounced critical. Such instances of fraud and medical negligence are not uncommon, and there have been several cases where medicos have been known to fill in for other doctors pretending to be the latter, and of medical negligence that has proved fatal. Hardly ever is action taken against such errant doctors, and few, if any, have had their medical licences revoked. Not all patients or their relatives raise a hue and cry when doctors botch up a case, and the handful that do, go uncompensated. It is appalling that the government has not taken any steps to rein in such doctors and penalise them for complicating their patient’s case.
What is needed are stricter rules imposed by an active regulatory body. This should especially apply in rural areas where the health delivery system is in a shambles. It is in the rural areas where the bulk of the population lives. In the absence of a proper system of healthcare, the people there are left at the mercy of quacks and untrained midwives whose poor knowledge of medicine does little to provide help to the sick or the pregnant women. While the government mulls over plans to improve the conditions of the health outlets in these areas, it must also think of ways to stop medical malpractice that should include legal action against erring doctors and nurses. That is the only way of preventing a further decline in the country’s medical services, especially where the poor are concerned.
The preparation of electoral rolls is one of the most important steps in the electoral process and any weakness in the process will directly impact on the credibility of the election outcome. It is, therefore, very important that citizens should examine the displayed draft electoral rolls, point out discrepancies, register as voters and verify their entries if they are already registered.
It is equally important that the people, the election commission and other concerned entities should closely examine the questions relating to the electoral rolls. These questions are extremely important in view of the fact that the electoral process is under criticism and public trust in it is low, and it is for the first time in Pakistan that computerised electoral rolls are being prepared involving expenses to the tune of one billion rupees.
Article 219 of the Constitution of Pakistan stipulates that the chief election commissioner shall be charged with the duty of preparing electoral rolls for election to the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies and revising such rolls annually. The preparation and revision of electoral rolls is governed by The Electoral Rolls Act, 1974 (Act No. XXI of 1974) as amended by Electoral Rolls (Amendment) Ordinance (No. LI of 2000) dated September 27, 2000, and The Electoral Roll Rules, 1974.
Nadra had prepared the electoral rolls for the local government election 2000-2001 and the general election 2002 with the help of its database. The 2002 rolls showed an addition of 5.5 million new voters due to the age of voting being reduced from 21 years to 18 years. The ECP was reportedly not satisfied with the quality of electoral rolls prepared by Nadra and also felt that a huge amount was charged by Nadra for the service.
Nadra admits to shortcomings in the electoral rolls prepared in 2000-2001 and in 2002 but adds that the work was done in a very short time and some saving was also effected in the agreed amount which was returned to the ECP.
The CEC initiated the process of preparing fresh electoral rolls on April 15, 2006, and decided to opt for door-to-door enumeration of voters instead of using the Nadra database as a baseline. The preparation of electoral rolls will cost around a billion rupees out of which a contract worth Rs560 million has already been awarded to Calsoft which is a joint venture of three Pakistani companies including TCS.
The project is funded by USAID and managed by a US non-governmental organisation IFES on behalf of USAID. Many experts believe that Nadra could have done the job in much less amount of money and time. Nadra and its capability to process and manage a huge amount of data has won wide international acclaim and it is intriguing why its database collected and compiled over the past many years could not be used for preparing fresh electoral rolls.
Election commission officials cite some electoral laws which do not permit the use of the Nadra facility. If so, how was this facility used in 2002 in contravention of the law? And why can’t the law be amended to facilitate a project of such vital public interest?
As of January 2007, Nadra had issued around 54 million CNICs which shows that its database is more comprehensive than the latest draft electoral rolls. It is issuing around 20,000 CNICs per day against a capacity of 75,000.
Although it is essential that the CNIC numbers filled in by the voters in their registration form should be verified to check against any misstatement, the election commission does not seem to have any plans to ask Nadra to verify the CNIC numbers in the new rolls. It had reportedly asked Nadra to share their database with it so that the latter could use it for preparing fresh electoral rolls. But Nadra reportedly refused to do that. Nadra cites security of data as the reason for not sharing the data but says it had offered to ECP and the government the use of Nadra data and services for preparing fresh electoral rolls.
This could have been done by assigning the work of electoral rolls to Nadra. The ECP maintains that their rules bind them to hold house-to-house enumeration. It is a pity that two important public institutions could not agree on a mechanism to work together for an important public project like electoral rolls.
Enumeration commenced on July 14, 2006, and was to conclude on Sept 11, 2006, but the last date of collection of forms by enumerators was extended to Sept 30, 2006. Initially, the computerised national identification card (CNIC) was declared a pre-requisite for registration for a voter. But later, the ECP announced that the old NICs (which were declared to be without legal value by the government of Pakistan) would also be acceptable for the purpose of registration as a voter.
Nadra claims that the issuance of CNICs picked up pace (around 900,000 CNICs being issued per month) soon after the ECP declared CNICs to be a prerequisite for registration as a voter but the volume dropped to around 500,000 CNICs after the condition was withdrawn.
Nadra charges Rs75 as fee for issuance of a CNIC. The issuance of CNICs to women is lagging and Nadra feels that if the incentive of issuing CNICs free of cost to women for a period of three months or so is done, it would help to increase the number of CNICs issued.
The publication of the draft electoral rolls for inviting claims and objections was set for January 20, 2007, by the ECP but the process has been delayed by about five months until June 2007. This means that the final electoral rolls which were to be ready by May 30, 2007, will not be ready before the end of October 2007.
The proposed electoral rolls will not contain pictures of voters although it would have increased the utility of the rolls and would have provided an additional and sometimes the only ready means of identification of voters.
India and Bangladesh are keen to update their electoral rolls to include photographs. Various other countries such as Uganda and East Timor already have electoral rolls with voters’ pictures. Nadra thinks that it can provide the service by linking the electoral rolls to its database. In fact, a broader consultative process with the citizens would have helped the ECP in setting better terms of reference for electoral rolls contractors.
The ECP has recently announced that around 52 million voters have sought to be registered as voters through the enumeration process. This low number has sent shockwaves among political parties and serious observers of the electoral process.
There were 71.86 million voters as per the electoral rolls in the 2002 election. This number should have grown to around 82 million in 2007 as per the rate of growth of 2.7 per cent per annum. This gap between the number of voters registered through the latest exercise of enumeration and the number to which it should have grown, using the number of voters in 2002 as a base, is around 27 million or 33 per cent.
This difference is informally explained by the ECP as being the result of duplications and/or bogus votes in the electoral rolls as these rolls were not computerised and there was no reliable system to check duplications. If this is the extent of duplication or bogus votes that one third of the electoral rolls were fictitious, then it is a very sad commentary on the competence of all concerned institutions, above all the election commission.
This makes the results of all past elections more suspect than they have been considered by a sizable number of citizens. This gap, therefore, remains unexplained and is a source of concern. Many political parties have complained that votes in their traditional supporters’ areas were deliberately left out. It is anticipated that there will be many questions by the public and political parties about such a wide gap between the old rolls and the new ones.
The entry of voters’ data from the collected forms has been undertaken in the data centre of the contractors located in Lahore. The data entry operation was not open to the public. One of the few fortunate persons who could undertake a conducted tour of the data centre while voters’ data was being processed was the former US ambassador Ryan Crocker. If the system was open to public observation, it would have enhanced public trust in the system.
The process to file an objection or claim to enter a new voter’s name is rather complicated and unless it is simplified, a significant numbers of voters may not be able to register or review the draft rolls. It makes a lot of sense that anyone with a CNIC should be able to register as a voter on the spot.
The election commission insists that the draft rolls can be viewed only at the 45,403 designated display centres throughout the country. Given the fact that not much time is left for the public and political parties to review the draft rolls and file objections and/or applications for additions, it would have made a lot more sense if these lists were provided to anyone who wanted these on nominal payment.
The ECP should, in fact, have placed the rolls on its website so that it could be accessed by any party or individual and reviewed at their leisure. The election commission should initiate amendment to the law if any law hinders the wider circulation and review of the electoral rolls.
The writer is executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency
executive.director@pildat.org