LAHORE, Oct 28: The three newly-created towns — Gulberg, Wagah and Samanabad — in the city are bedevilled by operational and financial problems, finding it hard to establish themselves on the ground.

The managers of the three towns maintain that a lack of staff, money, machinery and buildings hinders their efforts to establish existence of their office.

To their dismay, the Punjab government has also not announced provincial finance commission and not transferred any money to them.

The town nazims agree that these are operational problems and may dissipate with the passage of time, but they still lament that even basic facilities like office buildings and staff have not been allocated to them.

“There is no machinery available for any routine development and maintenance work,” says Samanabad Town nazim Mian Javed Ali. There are no heavy vehicles like dumper or trucks, rollers and bulldozers. The elected members can neither undertake development work without such heavy equipment nor can they maintain area under them, he says.

Now the Punjab government has promised Rs10 million for the purchase of machinery. But one can imagine what kind and quantity of heavy equipment one can buy with this amount, he adds.

Worse still, he says, there is no staff available to run the town office. A partial staff, which was transferred from other office, has still not joined and those who are coming to the office are not taking their work seriously. “Everything seems topsy turvy at the moment.”

Around 19 union councils were transferred from other towns to the newly-created Samanabad Town. Their budget has not been transferred to them due to which the officials are watching and waiting, he claims.

Khalid Ghurki, the Wagah Town nazim, regrets that the machinery belonging to the City District Government of Lahore should be distributed among towns, but it is not the case. Instead, the towns are being offered a paltry Rs10 million under this head.

“The towns cannot spend even Rs10 million because elections for naib nazims have not been held and houses are not complete.”

There is confusion all around and there is no place to sit because there is no town office. Even those towns established four years ago, like the Aziz Bhatti Town, do not have office yet. In these circumstances, it is not proper for a three-month old town to complain for an office, but it is a fact that working without office hardly encourages spirit of service that towns are supposed to demonstrate.

Since the provincial finance award has not been announced, all towns are waiting for budgets. But the newly-created towns are suffering more because they have to build their credibility.

“Once money starts flowing and town offices are built or hired on rent, things should start falling in place,” he says.

The tehsil municipal officer of Gulberg Town claims that the problems are there, but no one expects it to be a smooth sailing. The towns are suffering on almost all conceivable accounts.

“There is no money, no machinery and no staff. A temporary office has been set up at Model Town courts and things have started rolling. But until and unless money starts flowing in, one cannot expect any proper results.

“The town management has been told to hire trucks and vehicles, but it cannot hire enough vehicles to carry out, for example, anti-encroachment drive. Towns need machinery to carry out basic development and maintenance jobs.”