PESHAWAR: The Provincial Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and Settlement Authority (PaRRSA) has wound up a foreign-funded project designed to compensate the militancy-hit people in Malakand division without paying financial support to around 700 people even after a decade long wait.

The project was launched in 2009 with the financial support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the wake of the military operation against militants in Malakand division.

Sources said the pending compensation valued Rs220 million and the PaRRSA had Rs419 million in its bank account under the head of compensation as the USAID.

They said after the extensive military operation against militants in the region, the World Bank carried out a ‘sector wise damage need assessment’.

Official insists Malakand cases in question unfit for financial support

In the survey, 10,788 houses were reported as damaged, mostly fully damaged, according to official documents. Of them, the PaRRSA compensated 10,092 cases while remaining 696 could not be compensated due to lack of interest of authorities concerned.

The people were paid Rs400,000 for destroyed houses each and Rs160,000 for partially damaged ones each, show the documents.

When contacted, project manager Sajid Imran said the cases of unpaid compensation had been pending for a long time.

He said all those cases were sent back to the relevant district administration for verification over ‘procedural lacunas’.

The project manager said the district steering committees checked the pending compensation cases and allowed payment to 87 of the 774 pending cases.

He said on the recommendation of the steering committees, all other cases were declared unfit for compensation.

Mr Imran said every district steering committee consisted of the respective deputy commissioner, assistant commissioner, representatives of the Pakistan Army, and local elders.

“We have compensated over 10,000 people for completely and partially-damaged houses. We made all efforts to compensate all the militancy hit people,” he said.

He said the steering committee was ‘our ears and eyes’ and therefore, its recommendations regarding compensation had to be followed.

The project director said there was no other mechanism for verification and only relying on the district steering committee.

Sources in the PaRRSA said after the decade-long compensation pendency, the USAID, which funded the project, repeatedly called for the closure of the project and shifting of its fund to some other areas.

They said there were some bilateral agreements among countries under which one couldn’t run a project for an indefinite period.

Tehsil nazim Kabal Rehmat Ali told Dawn that the houses of hundreds of people were damaged in the activities of militants but around 100 of them, who were very poor, continued to be without compensation despite going all-out to claim it.

Representing the most-affected area of Swat district, he insisted that actually, such people were not mentioned in the initial survey for ‘political reasons’.

“The local elders, who were part of the survey, didn’t put their names in the list of the owners of damaged houses,” he said.

The official documents show now, the unspent USAID fund will be diverted to Chitral for the reconstruction of infrastructure damaged by the 2015 floods.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2018