KARACHI: While describing outages as the chief reason behind more than 1,000 deaths during the past week when the punishing heatwave gripped Karachi, two federal ministers on Friday said that Islamabad had ordered an inquiry into the reasons for the deaths and would fix responsibility on those who had failed to discharge their duty.

Speaking at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club, minister of states and frontier regions (Safron) Abdul Qadir Baloch and state minister for health sciences, regulation and coordination Saira Afzal Tarar said everyone was responsible for the deaths in Sindh, Karachi in particular, yet it would be proper to know those who failed to fulfil their responsibilities and contributed negatively to an already grave situation.

Earlier, the two ministers visited the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, Abbasi Shaheed Hospital and Edhi morgue as part of their mission to gauge the gravity of the situation, especially to ascertain whether the federal government was in some way involved or responsible for the deaths.

“An objective of our visit here is to ascertain whether we have committed anything that might have contributed to the graver situation or our government was responsible for any shortcomings, which could have been avoided,” said Mr Baloch.

Such tragedies came on tiptoes and hit their targets as no such deaths were reported between 2010 and 2014 when loadshedding was at its peak, he said.

“We are reviewing the situation sympathetically and seriously and we assure you that we will not spare anyone found showing irresponsibility in tackling the situation,” he added.

The minister said the provinces were autonomous after the 18th constitutional amendment and every province was responsible for basic facilities to its citizens.

Responding to a query relating to alleged poor performance by the K-Electric, he said the federal government had investigated the matter and got the K-Electric stance that they had supplied uninterrupted power. He said he held power outages as the key reason for the deaths in the city.

Ms Tarar said a committee had been constituted by the federal government to look into the affairs relating to power supply in the city.

But none of the ministers elaborated on the inquiry, its terms of reference and deadline.

She said most of the heatstroke victims were aged 50 and above. Referring to the 2010 heatwave in France, which had claimed 10,000 lives out of 13,000 in Europe, she said climate change had affected the entire world and Pakistan was no exception.

Published in Dawn June 27th, 2015

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