PESHAWAR, Nov 1: No department of the NWFP government has any data or information about the actual number of people displaced owing to the ongoing Swat crisis because of the limited capacity of the authorities to cope with emergency-like situations such as the one prevailing in the troubled district.

The revenue department, which played a central role in disaster management before the pre-devolution system introduced under the deputy commissioner, has no information about families affected during the five-day gunbattle between security forces and militants.

When asked about the number of families shifted to relief camps, a revenue department official said that so far they had no record because no victim had contacted the authorities. “Government officers cannot go out to assess the situation and find out the number of displaced people because of threats by militants,” he said.

Ehsanullah Khan, senior member of the Board of Revenue, expressed ignorance about the number of displaced persons when contacted by Dawn.

The Swat district government has established a 150-tent relief camp in the Balo village near Barikot for the affected families. DCO Arshad Majid said the district government needed 1,000 more tents to accommodate the displaced families.

The Crisis Management Cell in Peshawar also has no information about the number of displaced persons. An official said the cell had no data of the displaced people, though it had received a request for 1,000 tents and 4,000 blankets from the Swat DCO.

He was of the view that people did not want to live in the camp because of social constraints. “The women in the affected families observe strict pardah and they prefer to live with their relatives.”

Officials said that Manglore and Sangota were the worst-affected areas and people were migrating to safer places or going to their relatives. “They are not willing to stay at the camp set up in the Balo village,” the revenue official said.

However, the local people complained that the site selected for the camp was not easily accessible and also because the road leading to the camp was in bad condition.

An elder of the Fiza Ghat area told Dawn by phone that he had shifted his family to Islamabad.

“I have shifted my family to Islamabad, but I cannot leave my house and will stay here to protect my property.”

He appealed to the government to find a solution to the crisis quickly so that people could come back to their homes.Officials said that under the devolution plan, powers of various departments had been curtailed and they lacked coordination. “Duties are not defined due to which departments don’t act timely in times of crisis,” they added.

Although revenue officials working under the Board of Revenue were not bound to perform their duty as a relief agency, they had been doing it since the British rule, they said.

“The new system has diminished this very role of the revenue department whose staffers were once equipped with skills for the disaster management,” said an official.