IT was a week marked by health-related issues more than any other subject. Understandably so, because polio was still a health scourge that was refusing to go away; and smallpox had not yet been completely eradicated from Karachi.

On Aug 26, 1971 this newspaper came up with a report that underlined where health lay on the priority list of the authorities concerned. According to it, out of every rupee that the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) spent on the public health service sector, it did not invest more than three paisas in prevention of disease. Stats showed that the KMC spending on health was just over eight per cent of its total revenue budget. On that basis, the corporation’s disease prevention programme made a deplorable share of less than 3/16th per cent of the entire budget. The figures also indicated that the KMC’s focus in that sector was on the curative side. As per studies undertaken by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other relevant agencies, there were at least nine preventable diseases prevalent in the region. They were: tuberculosis, cholera, polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetnus, smallpox, measles and typhoid.

Staying on the topic, on Aug 23 it was announced that a consignment of 500,000 doses of polyvale polio vaccine would reach Karachi shortly. They had already been dispatched by Unicef for meeting the province of Sindh’s requirement with emphasis on Karachi. The vaccine was to be supplied free by the provincial health department to the Civil Hospital, Services Hospital, Jinnah Central Hospital and KMC hospitals.

This was necessary because the situation regarding the disease was getting out of control. On Aug 27, it was reported that polio, which had already assumed epidemic proportions, claimed nine more lives at the Epidemic Disease Hospital (EDH) in the previous three weeks. The number did not include the patients who were treated at government hospitals, private clinics or by family physicians. Doctors believed that the mortality rate in the country’s largest metropolis was at least four times that of the EDH. Most of the cases were brought to the facility from poorer localities – Liaquatabad, Sikandarbad, Landhi, Malir and Korangi.

The other important subject for any society, apart from health, is education; something Karachi’s administrators have always been cognizant of. On Aug 26, a symposium on library development in Pakistan was held in the city. It was highlighted at the event that there was an urgent need for legislation to give adequate cover of law to the promotion of library service in the country. In his inaugural address as the chief guest on the occasion, Justice Qadeeruddin Ahmed, chief justice of the High Court Sindh and Balochistan, invited the attention of the public and authorities to the importance of libraries and the need for establishing their networks at provincial, district, regional and local levels in order to meet the growing demand of having useful material to study. Advocating legislation on the matter, he said such kind of work could not be done in Pakistan unless there’s a legalised method of procuring bibliographies.

Only if getting things done by making your voice heard was that easy. On Aug 27, for example, chairman of the Film Exhibitors Association, Karachi region, Hakim Ali Zardari in an interview urged liberalisation of the code of film censorship and setting up a separate censor board in Karachi. He described the code as the most “defectively drafted document” with an extreme bureaucratic interference without any consideration for the welfare of the film industry.

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2021