Health projects frozen as secretary blocks funding

Not a single paisa of the Rs16 billion allocated for 141 development projects of the Health Dept has been released.

LAHORE: Three months into the fiscal year, not a single paisa of the Rs16 billion allocated for 141 development projects of the Health Department has been released, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Project directors and principals of autonomous institutions have expressed concern over the freezing of development work.

They alleged that the health secretary was deliberately not sending their cases for transfer/release of funds to the finance secretary. The autonomous institutions concerned include public hospitals and medical colleges.

“The stakeholders should be concerned, because this tussle over funding among the health secretary, Finance Department and Planning and Development Department has been going on for the last four months,” said a senior official in the Health Department.

The official told The Express Tribune that Health Secretary Fawad Hassan Fawad had written two letters to the Finance Department over the last four months in which he sought to open an assignment account in his own name and get all Rs16 billion allocated for development projects transferred into this account.

Under the normal process, project directors are meant to forward a requisition for funding to the health secretary, who then passes it on to the finance secretary, who then releases the funds to the project director. The health secretary, the official said, wants control over the entire process. He said that such an arrangement would make it very easy to “steal from the allocated funds”.

The Finance Department responded to the health secretary’s letters by pointing out that such an arrangement is not supported by finance rules. The Planning and Development Department sent the same opinion to the health secretary, the official said. He said that since then, the health secretary had not forwarded a single file to the finance secretary for the transfer or release of funds for development projects.

Project directors and principals of autonomous institutions told The Express Tribune that over the last two months the health secretary, touting the provincial government’s austerity drive and in order to divert funds to flood survivors, had issued notifications to curtail the spending of boards of management, principals, heads of institutions, medical superintendents and drawing and disbursing officers (DDOs) of all autonomous medical institutions under 15 different heads.

They said that this move had already done considerable damage to the provincial healthcare system. Now by holding files for the transfer of funds instead of forwarding them to the Finance Department, he had completely paralysed the health system in the Punjab, they said. The 141 development projects that have stopped receiving funding include projects for primary and preventive healthcare, tertiary care hospitals, medical education and research and development.

The health secretary was not available for comment.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 13^th, 2010.