KARACHI, Aug 24: The time-line for the Sindh Environmen-tal Protection Agency’s three-year vehicular emissions monitoring project expired in June this year and almost half of its Rs31 million grant has been spent, but the project itself is yet to get off the ground, Dawn has learnt.

The officials concerned maintain that it will be initiated shortly.

According to highly-placed sources, all that Sepa has achieved so far is the hiring of some project employees and the purchase of a portion of the required equipment, which has consumed nearly half the total funds. “Part of the study entailed the setting up of mobile stations to monitor vehicular emissions, but the vehicles on which these mobile stations were to be set up were not provided for,” they said. “The sites of the stationary stations were neither obtained nor even selected.”

The project is considered important since the number of vehicles in the province in general and in its three largest cities in particular is increasing rapidly. As a result of the increased vehicular emissions, the quality of air is deteriorating at an equally rapid pace, which is leading to an increasing incidence of various illnesses, including ailments of the respiratory tract, eye problems, asthma, retardation and some types of cancers.

With the high rate of inflation, pointed out the sources, vehicle owners are tending to spend less on engine maintenance while the escalating prices of fuel are prompting dealers towards adulteration. “Vehicles with poorly-maintained engines, or those running on adulterated fuel, emit more hazardous emissions,” they said.

The three-year Vehicular Emission Control Programme (Vecop) was approved in 2005 at the cost of Rs31 million, which was funded by the Sindh government. It was to monitor emissions in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur until June 2008.

Under the project seven emissions testing stations — three of them mobile and four stationary — were to be set up. The project was approved and funds were released but Sepa did nothing about it until November last year, when the then government was nearing the end of its five-year tenure. Suddenly, Sepa officials started working overtime and recruited 16 employees for the project, claimed the sources, but the prescribed rules were not followed in the hiring process.

Reportedly, the people employed included project director Shahid Farhad, and deputy directors Shafiq Rashid, Aneela Parveen, Nikhat Malik and Israr Zaidi.

Four assistant directors — Saquib Hussain, Tanveer Farhad, M. Kashif, and Ali Waheed — were also recruited. Lower staff included M. Faisal, M. Shahzad, Imran, Abbas, Riaz and Ali Karim Osama. The services of the last two were, however, terminated in May this year.

Pointing out that the staff was recruited in November, just a few months before the project was due to end in June this year, the sources said that the employees could still not start work since the required equipment had not been purchased. Eventually, the equipment was bought in May/June this year at the cost of more than Rs8.5 million.

Even then, however, the project could not get off the ground since the required vehicles had not been provided for, which meant that the mobile stations could not become functional. In terms of the stationary stations, the sites had neither been acquired nor selected.

Director hopeful about project