close
Thursday March 28, 2024

‘Pakistan has become export processing zone of doctors’

Karachi Pakistan has become an export processing zone of doctors, and because of a dire shortage of opportunities for professional improvement and measly salaries and benefits, most doctors opt to emigrate to the West. This grim warning was sounded off by social activist Dr Tipu Sultan while speaking at the

By Anil Datta
October 31, 2015
Karachi
Pakistan has become an export processing zone of doctors, and because of a dire shortage of opportunities for professional improvement and measly salaries and benefits, most doctors opt to emigrate to the West.
This grim warning was sounded off by social activist Dr Tipu Sultan while speaking at the inaugural session of the Third Federal Conference of the Progressive Writers Association (Anjuman-e-Taraqqi Pasand Musanafeen) at the Commecs College on Friday afternoon.
Quoting some grim statistics, Dr Sultan said that we had only 1,000 hospitals for a population of 180 million. Total per-capita expenditure on health, he said, was a mere 59 dollars. There was one doctor for every 1,206 patients and over a third of the population was living well below the poverty line.
Seventy percent of the people were rural who had virtually no health cover, he said, adding that the private health sector, which had 800 hospitals, was totally unregulated and virtually all urban-based.
“We need to up health spending to at least six percent of the GDP. Besides, we must accord utmost preference to the supply of clean drinking water and proper sewage. There should be more health care centres for the poor in the rural areas.”
Dr Sultan regretted that neither the dictatorial regimes nor the so-called democratic ones had accorded health care the preference it deserved. Health care and education, he said, were the basic constitutional and civic right of all citizens, regardless of affluence or poverty.
“The government should devise special, attractive pay and benefits packages for doctors to mitigate emigration,” he said.
Tracing the history of literature, noted writer, intellectual and journalist Jami Chandio discussed literary developments in Europe and the orient, and said literature was not only a mirror of society but also removed the aberrations in it and refined it.
Literature, he said, was all about the common man and was a profound comment on life, its vagaries, its joys, trials, tribulations and a whole lot of other aspects.
He especially eulogised Russian writer Maxim Gorky and, heaping praises
on him, said that Gorky really, most prolifically, brought to the fore the shortcomings in Russia’s elitist/feudal set-up. “Gorky’s writings created mass awakening among the masses and mobilised them for the Russian Revolution of 1917,” he said.
He lauded the “good work” being carried out by the Progressive Writers Association (PWA).
Noted prize-winning journalist Zubeida Mustafa, in her erudite discourse, said that the conference was highly timely given the state of the country and the world today with extremism and bigotry becoming the norm, utterly unmindful of the heavy toll they were taking in human life, the exploitation of the masses at the hands of a handful of capitalists. It was amid these grave conditions, she said, that the indispensable role of literature, and its power to inculcate noble sentiments, was felt with all the more urgency.
She said that even though the constitution of the country made education for children between 5 and 16 free and compulsory, education was a shambles. Education was transferred to the provinces under the provisions of the 18th amendment but no rules of reference had been prescribed.
“Government schools must fulfill their civic obligations towards the children and schools must be equipped with proper toilets and constant running drinking water,” she said. Here she quoted many cases where girl pupils, to relieve themselves, had to go all the way home because of a shortage of sanitary facilities at school and then didn’t return.
She was of the firm view that teaching at school need not be in English, insisting that it should be in the child’s mother tongue as that would expedite the process of assimilation and hasten learning.
Earlier, Dr Badar Ujjan, President, Convention Organising Committee, welcomed the guests and Mohsin Zulfiqar from the UK outlined the activities of the PWA in the UK and described how Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s birth centennial celebrations were organised there.
Masood Qamar from Sweden and Agha Gul from Balochistan also spoke.