LAHORE, Nov 20: The Punjab government is still indecisive about the future use of the 465 community centres which were built over private land and used as personal ‘dens’ by powerful politicians, rendering a loss of billions of rupees to the public exchequer.

No responsibility has been fixed on the misuse of the funds, official sources informed Dawn on Sunday.

The case of the much-publicized community centres scam, too, is lying pending with the National Accountability Bureau for the past many years.

Official sources said Punjab Local Government Minister Basharat Raja had recently held a meeting over the issue and it appeared that it would soon be resolved.

The ground reality was that the authorities were trying to find a way through which these community centres could be utilized for useful purposes without inviting any opposition from the powerful people who had built them with public money, the officials claimed.

They said one proposal was to make the influential people transfer their land on which these community centres were built to the government or recover the construction cost from them. “There is no denying the fact that the issue has been put on the back burner,” they said.

The community centres were built in Punjab from 1985 to 1996 when the Sharif family ruled the province, allowing politicians to build these centres for public service. Money ranging from a few thousand rupees to Rs5 million was issued for the community centres, which were made on private land. After the completion, most of those were converted into private outhouses.

Prior to 1990, certain community centres were constructed through project committees and their project files were not handed over to any department before the abolition of the committees. There were 37 such centres in Gujranwala and 46 in Sialkot and the facts about them were based on site verifications, cash books and work registers.

The Punjab government of Shahbaz Sharif sought a report of the community centres, but no action was taken. Finally, the Musharraf government took an action and sent the case to the NAB, but officials said no responsibility had so far been fixed by it.

“The incumbent provincial government took up the issue but the matter is pending,” the officials said, adding the community centres were sealed with the help of police. Now, they said, their buildings were in a shambles for want of attention and would be of no public use if a decision was not taken in near future.

According to the Punjab government record, some 171 community centres were constructed in the defunct Gujranwala division, 54 in Sargodha division, 24 in Faisalabad division, 55 in Lahore division, 72 in Multan division, 39 in Dera Ghazi Khan division, 48 in Bahawalpur division and two in Rawalpindi division.