PESHAWAR: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), party of Imran Khan, gained power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after winning the elections 2013 with a pledge to run a clean government, and transform health and education sectors.
Does PTI fulfill its promise to do unusual things in the province, where Imran Khan gained control of the province after breaking the national stranglehold of the two traditional rivals, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)?
According to The Economist report, the evidence is clear on corruption. Ministers no longer drive about arrogantly in motorcades a dozen vehicles long. The PTI’s term has seen little scandal. And the party has ended a free-for-all in which provincial assembly members could appoint friends and family to public-sector jobs. Federal handouts to the provinces have increased, and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa money is at last ending up where it is meant to.
The other promise from Imran Khan was to transform hospitals and schools. Things may be changing, though. A recent law seeks to pin wayward doctors to their official place of work. Only a handful have reappeared at the Lady Reading. But about 60 are back at work at another Peshawar hospital nearby.
Before, 2013 elections, according to Dr Khalid Masud, director the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, of the 45 senior consultants at the hospital, many pop in for no more than an hour a day if at all. Then they leave for their private clinics, taking with them those patients who can afford to pay. Patients without money can die before they see a specialist at the 1,750-bed facility.
That reform is possible in the province due to improved security following the army’s anti-Taliban campaign in 2014 and better PTI government has helped too.
The report says it (PTI) has also begun, albeit far from smoothly, to roll out a comprehensive health-insurance card for poor families. All this has had an effect. The number of operations in public hospitals has doubled since 2013; inpatient cases have risen by half as much again. Such change comes despite objections from special interests that lose out from reforms.
Another sector was education, PTI has certainly made schools more appealing: the party has appointed 40,000 more teachers, rebuilt institutions blown up by the Taliban and furnished others with toilets and electricity. Teacher absenteeism has fallen. But the party’s claim that about 100,000 students have chosen to switch from private to public schools is based on dodgy data. There are other bones to pick. In 2013 the PTI allowed its coalition partner, the Jamaat-e-Islami, to remove pictures in textbooks of women without a veil, among other measures.
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