THERE is no denying that this is a country familiar with incompetence, mismanagement and corruption scandals. Even so, the revelations recently made about the Punjab Thalassaemia Prevention Programme are astounding. Consider the following, which are just a few of the findings made by the Planning & Development Department of the Punjab government: the PTPP has been forcing field officers to carry on using expired medical items. “Out of 96,000 vials about 67,000 have expired or are near expiry,” says the report; some Rs17m were spent on establishing a DNA lab but it was never made operational, with the PTPP outsourcing the work to a private lab at a further cost of Rs5.7m; of the estimated 6,000,000 carriers in Punjab of the mutant thalassaemia gene, the PTPP managed to detect only 7,837. And where foetuses were found to test positive for thalassaemia major, the PTPP has no documentation regarding the termination of such pregnancies; in this regard, the report points out, “hypothetically if a single child out of 311 foetuses [that tested positive] has been born, then [the] complete exercise ... will be futile.”

Thalassaemia affects some one in six Pakistanis, and the PTPP was set up in 2009. The initial budgetary outlay was Rs147.4m, revised upwards till it reached Rs196.835m by December last year. Its task was to introduce thalassaemia preventative measures through intervention in 22 districts. That this is its performance speaks volumes for, first, the kind of interest taken by the Punjab government in one of its own initiatives and, second, the level of oversight involved. It is legitimate, here, to point out the waste of a massive amount of funds. But that would be to ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of adults and children who continue to suffer from this grievous affliction. Once again, it would seem, the promises of help made to them by their government remain confined to good intentions alone, with their fate abandoned to the promise of easy money.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2015

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