Assembly session: ‘More medical colleges not metro bus service’

PPP’s Naulatia says Mobile Health Units have been a waste, Basra’s mic gets turned off.

LAHORE:

The opposition benches, on Monday, directed their wrath at the Punjab government’s reports on the Health Department and said Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif was ignoring the health of the people of the province.

The Assembly resumed its session at 4.50pm instead of the scheduled 3pm under the chairmanship of Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal. Parliamentary Secretary Zafar Iqbal Nagra answered questions regarding his department (Housing, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department).

Reports on medical and health institutions for the years 2006, 2007 and 2008 were presented for general discussion in the house.

Pakistan Peoples Party’s Ehsanul Haq Naulatia said that the Assembly’s secretariat had provided him 90 reports at 11am on Monday. He said these consisted of 6,000 pages. He said the debate should be deferred to another day.  The speaker ruled against the motion.

He said the government’s initiatives of Mobile Health Units had failed in south Punjab. He said the project costing billions of rupees had stopped working. Naulatia said that the government should instead have improved the performance of the tehsil head quarters and district head quarters hospitals. He said the government was focusing attention on the teaching hospital and had completely ignored the THQ and the DHQ hospitals. He said a large number of patients had to be shifted from THQ and DHQ hospitals to the teaching hospitals. He said there was little point to appointing surgeons at the THQ/DHQ hospitals when patients had to be rushed to teaching hospitals for operations.



He said that according to the reports the chief minister had suspended more than 100 gazetted officers and after a month restored them to service. He asked why they had been suspended and reinstated. He said giving 50 per cent weight to the entry test for admission in medical colleges was unjust to the students from south Punjab. He said the entry test tested language proficiency and A-level students benefitted from it.

He said more medical colleges should be set up and run on fees charged from overseas students. He said the Rs30 billion spent on the Metro Bus projects had been a waste of public money.He said the money should have been spent on constructing 60 medical colleges.

PPP’s Shaukat Mehmood Basra, rising on a point of order, demanded that PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had not gotten answers to the questions he had raised in his speech at Garhi Khuda Buksh. He said the killers of Benazir Bhutto had not been captured while the chief justice of Pakistan took suo motu notice over the prices of sugar and electricity. He urged the house to unanimously support Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s stance.  The speaker, however, did not allow him to go any further and switched off his mic. The session was adjourned till Thursday (January 3) at 3pm.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 1^st, 2013.