Rawalpindi Women Hospital & Chest Disease Centre cries for attention

ISLAMABAD: In the wake of 18th Constitutional Amendment, some development projects have become major victims of devolved mechanism as one classic example is 400 bed Women Hospital & Chest Disease Center, Rawalpindi, where cost overrun stood at over 300 percent despite passing the timeline by several years.

This project has been hanging between the Centre and Punjab whereby no one is ready to take responsibility despite undertaking over 50 percent physical work of this hospital and now ghosts are staying in the built structure, built with hard earned money of taxpayers.

The deteriorating governance of the country could be gauged from these fact that this very important and need of the day project titled 400-Bed Women Hospital & Chest Disease Center – Rawalpindi was approved by the Executive Committee of National Economic Council (ECNEC) during the Musharraf regime in August 2005 with a timeframe to complete it within three years i.e. by 2008 but after wasting 11 years on the ground, nothing was delivered to the public whereas bed-to-patient ratio was much lower than the international standards in twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad.

All this was happening under the nose of powers that be who live just few kilometers away in the red zone of the country but this neglected project has never been able to attract their kind attention.

After devolution in the wake of 18th Constitutional Amendment, the Cabinet Division got the sponsorship of this project in October, 2011 whereas the executing agency was PWD.The original PC-1 was of Rs1.325 billion, with completion period of 3 Years and expenditure incurred up to 30-June-13 stood at Rs.1.009 billion and progress on physical work is of 53% so far.

According to latest development couple of months back, the air conditioning units arrived while warranty period of these equipments had already expired.The Planning Commission convened a meeting to handover this project to Punjab but they had not shown any interest to complete this project.

The cost of the project has been increased by 300% i.e. to Rs.3.925 billion which could further increase exponentially, if proper and timely decision are not taken especially by the Centre and Punjab Governments.

Punjab Government argues that that the project would only be acceptable to them once it is completed by federal government. But the federal government took stance that Punjab should seriously look into the matter to complete this project on war footing as they have done mega project of Metro, energy etc. or some concrete strategy should be devised to decide whether they could do it or not or they could sit down with federal Government to save huge public amount of the exchequer as the spending of around Rs.1.3 billion made so far is just a waste.

It is the view of the Centre that at provincial level there is a vast network of Health Care Facilities under the control of Provincial Health Departments which included 946 hospitals, 4554 Dispensaries, 5290 Basic Health Units and Sub-health Centres, 907 Mother and Child Health Centres, 552 Rural Health Centres and 289 TB Centres run by the provincial governments.

The goal of the Government in 2005 was to reduce the incident of Tuberculosis per 100,000 by 45 in the year 2015 from 160 has not yet been achieved. Now the government has committed to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 so there was need to resolve this lingering controversy to complete this important health project for avoiding further time and cost overrun.