HYDERABAD: Waterborne diseases and malnutrition claimed six more babies’ lives in drought-ravaged Thar on Saturday, raising the toll to 173 since Jan 1, but adviser to the Sindh chief minister on information Maula Bux Chandio stuck to the official stance that the Sindh government is not responsible for it.

Mr Chandio told journalists in Tando Mohammad Khan that the government was making serious efforts to improve the Thar situation. “The government is deeply worried over deaths of newborn babies because the depth of love a family feels for its baby can not be put into words,” he said.

He admitted that life in Thar was very hard with its own peculiar social dynamics like underage marriages etc. Besides, people lived in remote villages with little communication among one another, these and other such problems had also contributed to the present situation, he said.

Mr Chandio said the government had done a lot to help Thar people. Mithi district headquarter hospital had been equipped with several facilities and now it could be compared with any other hospital in urban areas, he claimed.

He dismissed the formation of an anti-PPP alliance and said such alliances were formed in the past as well but they had little impact on people and they always voted PPP to power.

He said that though the local bodies department had powers to provide basic facilities to people these powers could be reviewed whenever the government felt the need and more powers could be transferred to LGs.

Six more babies die in Thar

MITHI: Waterborne diseases and malnutrition claimed lives of six more babies in drought-ravaged Thar on Saturday, raising the toll to 173 since Jan 1 this year.

Six-month-old Heera Mati Kolhi died in Ghatyari village near Nagarparkar, a year-old Neeta and a newborn baby died at the Mithi Civil Hospital and a baby died in Syed Zaman Shah village, another child died in a village near Chelhar and an infant Hareesh Bheel died in Bourli Naro village.

Health officials said that 85 ailing children had so far been referred to hospitals in Hyderabad and Karachi but they failed to inform how many of them survived on their way to the referred hospitals.

They claimed that only 57 kids had died since Jan 1 so far and said that 936 kids suffering from various diseases were brought to six health facilities of the district over the past week of the current month.

A health official who wished not to be named disclosed to Dawn that over 50 per cent of the ailing babies who were referred either died on their way or in the hospitals or during treatment.

The children’s parents complained to journalists that despite increase in budgetary allocations of hospitals, they still remained deprived of quality healthcare facilities.

PML-N MNA Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani deplored that the Sindh government was wasting its energies on making false claims and rejecting media reports about recurring deaths of babies instead of making serious efforts to mitigate people’s sufferings.

He said that Thar still remained deprived of facilities of adequate healthcare and safe drinking water as most of the reverse osmosis plants had stopped functioning and hundreds of dispensaries had no staff at all or no medicines to give to the poor.

Dr Vankwani urged the many non-governmental organisations working on health issues in Thar to honestly assess the situation and reach out to the poor. Besides children, cattle heads were also dying for want of fodder and outbreak of diseases, he added.

Nadeem Wagan of the Health and Nutrition Development Society, an NGO, said that his organisation was cooperating with the local government functionaries to provide medical help to the poor. But there was still need for bringing healthcare facilities to remote villages of the desert to help mitigate unending suffering of people, he said.

Transgenders visit Thar hospitals

A large group of transgenders from Sukkur and other towns visited hospitals in Mithi town and distributed fruit, biscuits, clothes and other relief goods among the ailing children and their parents.

Talking to journalists, the group’s leader Sanam Faqir deplored that the government was not serious about averting children’s deaths in spite of heavy death toll of infants this year.

Faqir urged members of the parliament to visit Thar and donate their salaries to help improve health facilities in the desert region and express sympathies with the parents of the dying children.

Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2016