MULTAN, June 13: The Punjab health department is all set to launch a women health project at a cost of Rs1.51 billion in the next fiscal amid apprehensions of it being yet another fiasco.

Experts believe the project will be a replica of several other ongoing health programmes.

Dawn learnt on Wednesday the health department had sought Rs300 million from the government to launch the WHP in Jhelum, Gujranwala, Sargodha, Multan, Bhakkhar, Hafizabad, Bahawalpur and Rajanpur.

Objectives of the project are to increase access to priority reproductive health interventions, to develop women-friendly district health system and to build the institutional and human resource capacity for supporting reproductive health.

The project feasibility shows a requirement of total cost of $25.2 million. Of the amount, donor agencies will pay 80 per cent ($20.2 million) while the balance will be paid by the Punjab government. Of the donors’ share, Asian Development Bank will lend $15.9 million, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries $3.3 million and Unicef will give $1 million.

A number of health department administrators said the project had duplicity like other programmes including Mother and Child Health care, Extended Programme for Immunization, Malaria Control Programme, Integrated Management of Child Illness, AIDS control programme and TB control programme.

They claimed all these projects were already under-utilized owing to a number of reasons. As the health department could not achieve success in improving health status of mother and children in particular and of community in general, they asked why was it initiating another project with the same objectives.

A senior health official, on the request of anonymity, told this correspondent that the department was launching another programme without mending loopholes in those it had already initiated. The country’s foreign debt had come to $36.04 billion and the policy-makers did not care much about it, he added.

The government should reconsider the prospects of the WHP before releasing funds, he suggested. “Any project launched without a major overhauling of the Punjab health department will make no difference, “ he said.