KARACHI: The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan on Monday rejected a proposed plan of the Pakistan Peoples Party-led Sindh government to take control of the Karachi Institute of Heart Diseases (KIHD) and vowed to use all legal and democratic means to resist the move.

Leaders of the opposition party along with employees of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation-run KIHD held a protest demonstration outside the health facility in Federal B. Area and asked anti-graft bodies and the federal government to take notice of the PPP government’s unchecked misuse of authority and financial corruption through government institutions.

The participants of the demonstration also demanded the Sindh government to release funds for the KIHD as it had been unable to pay salaries of its staff for the last several months.

Senior MQM-P leader Khawaja Izharul Hasan while addressing the protesters alleged that the “racist and corrupt” provincial administration had already financially crippled the city’s municipality and had been taking over the resources of urban Sindh on various pretexts for the past 13 years.

He said that the KIHD was established by the then city government in 2006 and now the provincial government was plotting to take control of it to hand it over to the National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD).

“The so-called free treatment and services at the NICVD have lately been exposed. Patients are paying Rs80,000 to hundreds of thousands for angiography and other procedures there. There are 7,500 workers of the NICVD but most of them are ghost employees and offering their services as personal servants of PPP leaders,” he said.

Khawaja Izhar said that his party was going to challenge the provincial government’s move in court.

Published in Dawn, November 2nd, 2021