Adding insult to injury: Health minister derides birth rate in Thar

Earlier, the CM had blamed the midwives for the rising infant mortality

HYDERABAD: As the drought in Tharparkar ruthlessly continues to claim the lives of children, with five more deaths reported on Wednesday, the government's functionaries seem eager to rub salt into the people's wounds. "By the age people in civilised societies think of marrying their daughters, Thari women have given birth to eight children," mocked the Sindh health minister, Jam Mehtab Dahar.

Dahar, accompanied by law minister Sikandar Mandhro and Dr Jan Mohammed Memon, the former vice-chancellor of Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, visited Mithi on Wednesday.

"Due to cultural problems, the Thari people don't even consider family planning," he claimed. "Children are also dying in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. But KP is not on the agenda of the powers on whose agenda the media is working in Thar."

The minister's claims pertaining to child birth and early marriages, however, prove false in the face of official statistics. The Sindh Population Welfare Department has estimated the birth rate in Tharparkar at five per couple, according to the data available at the department's website.

"Such sweeping statements are an insult to the Tharis. You have no right to mock the people if you can't help them," said Noor Muhammad Bajeer, a member of the government's committee that drafted the Thar drought policy.

Bajeer argued that the problem of early marriages was not restricted to Tharparkar alone. "The way the ministers depict the issues is distant from reality. Such traditions can hardly be found in one or two per cent of the rural areas of Thar."

On Wednesday, four children were reported to have died in Chachro tehsil. Separately, a ten-month-old child died in Civil Hospital, Mithi's nutrition ward.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 27^th, 2014.