Heavy industries lacking in Bahawalpur

BAHAWALPUR, the former capital of the former princely state of the same name, is known for its industrial backwardness. The area is without any heavy industrial unit, due to which the problem of unemployment is serious. The former division comprises the three districts of Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar and Rahim Yar Khan, which is the cotton-growing belt of southern Punjab and its economy depends on the silver fibre. Bahawalpur produces almost 33 per cent of fine quality cotton but its revenue is never spent on its development.

In the past, inadequate attention was paid to this subject. After the former state’s integration with Pakistan, three industrial units were set up in Rahim Yar Khan city. Of them, Abbasi Textile Mills has been sold out while the Lever Brothers factory of Dalda Ghee has shifted to some other place. However, the third one which is a fertilizer factory, is working at Machi Goth near Sadiqabad.

Bahawalpur and Bahawalnagar remained without heavy industry, with the result that their progress slowed down. It is said that sometimes ago the industries sanctioned in the name of Bahawalpur division were shifted to other cities.

During the Ayub regime, a cabinet minister, Abdul Waheed Khan, was granted a licence of a textile mill here but he sold it out to a Chinioti Sheikh family, which established a spinning mill on Sammasatta Road.

In 1962, the then West Pakistan government established a small industrial estate in Bahawalpur, but it could not function for six years. However, in 1968, its 47 units started production, which included towels of superior quality. The owners earned profit by exporting their products to Moscow and other countries.

After 1977, a private ghee unit was established. But, in the floods of 1988, all the units in this estate were badly damaged and most of them stopped functioning. This led to loan default by the owners, and many of them abandoned their units and went abroad.

At present, only 12 units are working on a small scale. Since then, the Punjab Small Industries Corporation is seized of the issue and along with the Bahawalpur Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) is making efforts to revive the sick units to settle the loan with the banks.

In Bahawalnagar district, there is also such an estate. The government could not encourage the investors to set up industrial units in it. A textile mill was established in the private sector but its production remained confined to the spinning of yarn. However, the district has some ginning factories and a sugar mill at Chishtian.

The BCCI is working on a number of programmes, which could not get the government’s attention. As a result, the three districts could not make any headway in the industrial sector. The most important demand of BCCI relates to the facility of a tax-free zone and zero duty areas on lease for a period of 10 years. This will encourage the new entrepreneurs to establish their concerns in the three districts. The outside investors could only be attracted if this facility is provided to them.

At present, a small industrial estate exists, where most of the units are lying idle. Owing to non-availability of private land on economical rates, a large number of investors hesitate to invest in this zone and instead prefer other districts and areas, where they are provided with land by the government on economical prices. Therefore, in order to facilitate the investors, there is need to procure land on cheap rates. This could only be possible if the government established a heavy/medium industrial estate along with export processing zones at Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan for the time being.

Recently, the Minister of Industries took some initiative to set up an export processing zone (EPZ) at Rahim Yar Khan but nothing is being done for the EPZ’s establishment in Bahawalpur.

BCCI’s negotiations with the government for the establishment of a heavy industrial estate had been going on but to no avail. The government, some years ago, had carried out a survey for the availability of about 500 acres for this estate at Mauza Jugiat Peer near Lal Sohanra on Bahawalpur-Hasilpur Road. But, no progress has been made in this matter.

BCCI also had proposed this site to the government for heavy industrial estate, where roads, water and other infrastructure could be made available. With the establishment of this industrial estate, entrepreneurs even from foreign countries could be encouraged for setting up industries at Bahawalpur, providing jobs to unemployed local people.

This step will boost the economic development of Bahawalpur as well as of the whole country.

Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan are without any office of Export Promotion Bureau. The exporters and businessmen of the two cities have to shuttle between Bahawalpur or between Rahim Yar Khan and Multan, where the EPB bureau is functioning.

It is interesting that the Ministry of Commerce has already given its approval for the establishment of an office of EPB here, but its implementation is not being done by the department concerned.

Bahawalpur region has great potential for exports and for that reason an EPB office here can play a vital role in boosting export from this area.

Similarly, the Industrial Development Bank (IDB) and PICIC have also been approached for opening their branches in Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan. As cotton is the main crop of this area, the ginners complain of a cotton crisis since 1999. During 2000-2001, the total paid-up sales tax of the cotton factories of the three districts stood at about Rs6 billion.

During the last year’s cotton season, the Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP) did not lift the cotton according to government’s advice with the result that the ginners suffered losses.

About 1 million bales of lint cotton are still lying unsold in the ginning factories while another 500,000 are with the growers, who are waiting for higher prices.

BCCI office-bearers demand that as they are under debt of banks and growers, therefore, banks should reduce the mark-up rates and the government should merge all the taxes for their convenience.

The chamber has been demanding that the discretionary powers of the bureaucracy should be curtailed so that the bureaucrats could not harass the industrialists and businessmen.

Being a cotton producing area, Bahawalpur needs a technical institution from where skilled people could be provided for the development of textile industry.

Bahawalpur has no proper arrangements for providing health cover and facilities for workers. There is no social security hospital for them. However, only a social security dispensary is working on Sammasatta Road. This is located at an unsuitable place as most of the workers are employed in the city. Moreover, its timings do not suit the labour class, who could only visit it after working hours in the afternoon or evening.

The social security department should set up a full-fledged hospital in Bahawalpur city, which is centrally located and approachable for the workers of the district.

A painful walk through CHK

FOR all the beautification and the affluence that the Sindh capital reflects, and all the arrogant affluence that it mirrors without any guilt, it makes one wonder whether places like the Civil Hospital, Karachi (CHK), in particular, have been forgotten? Somehow both officialdom and our private sector zealots seem to push forward the notion that private medical care is the answer to the suffering of the poor. A new world order is coming.

The subject today is: the Civil Hospital Karachi, a visit to which on Sunday last not only made one so depressed, but which drove home the point that there is enormous neglect (to say the least) that the huge institution is suffering from. It is so unclean and so gloomy that it is shocking. Anyone minding the place is what one is compelled to ask. And ask much much more.

Let me state at the very outset that I am one of those Karachiites who have been visiting the Civil Hospital Karachi since the mid-sixties. Those were days when some friends, like today’s Dr Azhar Faruqui, our noted cardiologist, were students at the Dow Medical College.

Student politics extension from the Karachi University, or extra curricular activities took us there frequently. Then came one’s journalism days, and going to Civil Hospital was regular routine. Since then, one has over the last almost four decades, been a casual visitor to the CHK, which should by now have been a model hospital. That is, if things had gone the right way. If the men and women who have managed and worked there, done their jobs fairly and properly, and if the resources had been enough, and properly utilized.

Cut the long story short, see what happened on Sunday last and what a frightening fleeting glimpse one got of the hospital. We entered from the gate, alongside the Dow Medical College, and thereafter it was a sorry state of affairs that gradually unfolded as we walked through to the ICU of the Burns Ward. We walked for several minutes and it made one feel sick. It was so dirty, not just the spitting filth that was the result of people visiting the place, or using it, but that which was very easily one born of larger neglect, and inefficiency — and what some will describe as ‘criminal negligence’. A blood bank, a patient welfare association, a cardiac setup, and so on, all there. The CHK must surely have it all. But in what pathetic condition? One is forced to question. The walls were in disgusting unhygienic condition, and the writing of the state of the hospital was on the wall!!

In the Burns Ward ICU was a picture of absolute shock. It was full of patients, men and women in varying degrees of suffering and while there was a senior nurse on duty, there was little else to suggest truly that it was an Intensive Care Unit. There was virtually no equipment for monitoring or otherwise, and there was a foul smell in the open air ICU! Visitors walked in and out of the ICU, without slippers (thank God) but all others had their shoes on. Of course there was no check on any visitors and needless to say that there was deep depression and sadness in the place. I was there to see a young patient who had tried to set himself on fire, in an attempt to get rid of a ‘Jinn’, (said his family). Now that is another sad story, painful, pathetic, and indicative of the way in which Pakistani society functions. There were other burns patients like these, and there were patients (on beds without bedsheets), who had caught fire by accident. Women, young, who were fighting for life. I talked to the duty nurse briefly. It was impossible to stand there.

To get to this ICU Burns Ward and visit this patient who had suffered 52 per cent burns, one had to see walls so dirty and corridors so stained, that it reminded one of such walls in some of the poorer cinema houses in the city. There were all sorts of commercial and political posters on the walls, and some ‘chai walas’ selling tea in corners, for the comfort of patients’ attendants. Of course there were attendants stationed at various places in the large hospital, and at some place where these men and women sat or slept, there was overflowing sewerage that reminds me of the leaking broken sewerage pipelines which symbolized the condition of the hospital.

One is certain that the CHK management does function on a daily basis — but there is not the slightest doubt that whatever is being done is just not enough. That, in fact, there is everything in the atmosphere that makes one wonder whether the hospital is ever going to help meet the challenges that the poor of the city will present in the future. How big is the failure of today? Just think.

There were many questions that came to mind. What is the kind of treatment that patients get at the CHK? And what is the answer to the problems that the hospital is suffering from? A short walk only through a part of the institution is enough to make you ask such questions. It makes you contemplate the disturbing inadequacy of the hospital. There are a few islands of efficiency and modernity in the CHK. One hears of them so frequently, and such names as SIUT come to mind. If that can be done why can’t more be done for the Civil Hospital. Why is the image of the CHK in such a sorry shape? Why is the reputation of government hospitals unable to improve to some degree of respect, decency and reliability? Is there something missing with the managements of these hospitals? Is there an absence of accountability, any accountability, whatsoever?

Had one seen the Civil Hospital, Karachi, for the first time in October 2002, one would have been rudely shocked that a hospital today can have this kind of an ambience. But as one who has seen it over decades, and seen its apparent decline, and its diminishing image, it is even more saddening and shocking. For all the pompous speeches that provincial health minister and other responsible VIPs and bureaucrats have been making, and for all the goody goody talk that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been doing, there is a world of unfinished business at this hospital.

This hospital is crying for attention, as indeed are others in the city. Not just media focus, but there is ample reason to x’ray the institution, where the literal stink and stain alone tell you there is something rotting out there.

Future of Pakistan hockey looks bleak courtesy PHF

Pakistan hockey hit an all-time low at both senior and junior level, when the senior team failed to win any medal at the Asian Games, finishing among also ran and the junior team which took part in four-nation tournament in Egypt also finished last.

The results produced by the seniors and juniors fully reflects the functioning of the Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) which has become a victim of good governance, as claimed by the present regime. Hockey is not the only sports which has suffered most during the present government as overall, the performance of our sportsmen has generally gone down just because of poor management and selection of team management.

It was for the first time that Pakistan failed to figure on the victory stand at the Asian Games. In it’s appearance on 11 different occasions, it won seven gold, two silver and one bronze while this time it brought nothing but disgrace.

The junior team which went to Egypt, to take part in the four-nation tournament finished at rock bottom losing all it’s four matches against India, France and Egypt.

The junior squad created an all time record when it failed to score even one goal against any team. Such a poor performance has no parallel in the history of Pakistan hockey. Even if a club team would have been sent to Egypt, I can bet it would have scored against one of the teams. Besides India none of the other participants, Egypt, or France have any credible hockey record or hockey history.

To add insult to injury, team coach, former Olympian Qamar Ibrahim, had the cheek to say that the Egyptian experience will be useful for the youth. Any hockey player of Pakistan would have preferred to gracefully quit rather than make such absurd observations. Anybody who can come out with such remarks should be barred from entering any hockey arena as he has no self respect or respect for the country.

And the best part of it is that the team manager Col (Retd) Abdul Rauf and team coach Ayaz Mahmood instead of coming home left the team and proceeded to Dubai to play in some non-event veteran match which has no official recognition. The Chef de Mission, of the 28-member junior squad, Zafar Iqbal, a senior government servant, presently posted in the CBR also proceeded to Dubai for the event.

As if it was not enough, it was perhaps for the first time that a hockey squad comprising 28 members went to Egypt. Believe it or not, the most horrifying thing which has surfaced is that the PHF did not have the funds to buy the tickets for the team and the funds were raised from unknown sources just because the officials were more interested in donning the green blazer and heading the team rather than showing any interest in the performance of the team.

Now it is for the ministry of finance, headed by Shaukat Aziz, chairman of the CBR, the PHF and the accountability Bureau to show their presence and a probe be ordered into the affairs of hockey as it should not be handed over to all and sundry. It means anybody who can raise funds, legally or illegally can become team official of any sports which is in financial straits.

The performance of the junior team should be an eye opener to the PHF who should realise what Ayaz Mahmood has produced and what they have produced as the future of hockey depends on the youth of today. If they are not groomed properly and given in the hands of genuine and dedicated people, the future of hockey looks very, very bleak. It is the dead end of hockey and a fresh start will have to be made from scratch. People who cannot find time to look after it should better voluntarily quit before the situation takes an ugly turn.