GUJRAT: The Pakistani expatriates in Norway have donated a sum of Rs13 million for the Gujrat Kidney Centre at a donor’s conference held in Oslo, the Norwegian capital, this week.

The conference was organised by the Pakistan Union Norway chairman Qamar Iqbal, where a delegation comprising five members of the Board of Governors (BoG) of the Kidney Centre, being led by Mian Muhammad Ijaz, the president of Patients Welfare Association, Gujrat, was also present.

The BoG comprises Punjab Minister for Higher Education Raja Yasir, PPP president and former federal minister Qamar Zaman Kaira, Punjab emir of Jamaat-e-Islami Dr Tariq Saleem, businessmen Chaudhary Ijaz Ahmed Warraich of Shahdoula Town and Chaudhary Azhar Hussain. Asim Mushtaq Butt also attended the event.

The BoG members in their speeches at the conference appealed to the expatriate community for giving donations for the noble cause of helping needy kidney patients.

Mian Ijaz told Dawn by telephone from Norwegian capital on Thursday that though the main event of the donors conference was held in Oslo on Sunday, later two other events were organised in Norway where overseas Pakistanis also gave cash donations for the Kidney Centre, making the tour quite successful in terms of fundraising.

He said the seven-member organising committee of the overseas Pakistanis in Norway had handed over total Rs13 million collected donations to him on Wednesday and pledged to continue financial and moral support to the Kidney Centre in future.

He said the funds requirement of the healthcare facility was also increasing with surge in number of patients visiting it from neighbouring districts of Gujrat, including Mandi Bahauddin, Jhelum, Wazirabad and Bhimbher (Azad Jammu and Kashmir).

He said currently the BoG members had been collecting Rs5.5 million per month through donations for the Kidney Centre where at least 75 to 80 patients were being provided dialysis facility free of cost that had pushed the expenditures up to Rs6.5m to Rs7m monthly. Keeping in view the centre’s expenditures, the BoG decided to seek donations from the expatriate community belonging to Gujrat, he added.

He said with the help of these donations by the expatriate community a lithotripsy machine for crushing the kidney stones would be installed at the centre by October this year. He said the centre would be gradually transformed into a kidney transplant facility with the help of philanthropists.

The Kidney Centre had been established as a public-private partnership project by the then Gujrat deputy commissioner Liaqat Ali Chatha in 2016 with the help of local philanthropists. So far a sum of Rs200 million had been spent on the construction work, installation of machinery and equipment at the centre, he added.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2019