PESHAWAR: Opposition members in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly on Tuesday declared the government’s compensation package for the victims of the Oct 26 earthquake peanuts and demanded a reasonable increase in the amount.
Participating in the debate on the post-earthquake situation, they insisted the government had failed to provide the required tents, food items, blankets and medical treatment to the disaster-hit people.
“A single washroom can’t be constructed at Rs200,000 which the government is paying to owners of the fully damaged houses,” MPA Syed Jaffar Shah told the house.
He said it was not compensation and instead, it was a joke with the affected families.
Insists money being given to people is even not enough to build a washroom
Shah, who belongs to the Awami National Party, said he had some reports that the affected people had begun migrating to Punjab as they couldn’t bear the extreme cold weather in damaged houses on hills.
He demanded that the government declare northern districts calamity-hit as besides human losses, the people had also suffered financial losses including damage to houses and killing of livestock.
Sahibzada Sanaullah of the PPP blasted the provincial government for ‘faulty’ damage assessment survey ignoring many affected people in his constituency in Upper Dir.
Without naming Jamaat-i-Islami, which is the partner of the ruling coalition in the province, he said most relief packages had been distributed to the workers of a political party.
Sahibzada Sanaullah said the district administration in Upper Dir had miserably failed to collect accurate data on earthquake damages and provide relief packages to the affected people.
“Of the 843 earthquake victims, whose houses were fully damaged, the district administration has only considered 224 for compensation,” he said.
The PPP MPA said the deserving people had yet to be given compensation.
Sharing the PDMA data on the floor of the house, he said around 12,000 houses were fully damaged but the authority had distributed only 3,000 tents among them.
Like other lawmakers, he termed Rs200,000 insufficient compensation for the fully damaged houses, saying even the debris of the damaged houses couldn’t be removed with the use of that money.
He demanded of the government to conduct another survey and compensate all the genuine affected people immediately.
Sardar Aurangzeb Nalotha of the PML-N said compensation for the fully and partially damaged houses should be increased to Rs800,000 and Rs300,000, respectively.
“A house cannot be constructed at Rs200,000,” he said, adding that most affected people were poor people.
Participating in the debate, leader of the opposition Maulana Lutfur Rehman said the successive governments failed to establish a disaster management body having all equipment and skilled people for effective and timely response in disasters.
He said there should be coordination between the federal and provincial governments for relief activities and distribution of compensation.
“The earthquake has affected thousands of people but the government has failed to give proper attention to them,” he said.
The opposition leader demanded of the government to take tangible steps instead of making tall claims about relief activities and compensation.
Responding to the criticism of lawmakers, senior minister Inayatullah Khan said of the around 92,000 damaged houses, the provincial government had so far compensated the owners of 53,000.
“All the credit goes to the provincial government for compilation of data on damages and releasing compensation to quake victims within a month,” he said.
Published in Dawn, November 25th, 2015
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