You might have seen the cartoon of a mother comforting a sick child. You have fever, she says to him, I will make you chicken soup. Hearing this, a chicken who happened to be sitting on the windowsill says, “WTF?! Just give him a paracetamol!”
One is reminded of this whenever critics of the government, when taking on any real or perceived lapse by the state in a random situation, bring up the Metrobus projects. The template of this criticism is simple: “The government can’t even do XYZ, but they keep building Metrobus projects!” Hearing this, one of the many working class individuals who use these mass transit projects daily would say, “WTF?! Spend on XYZ as well; why bring up the Metrobus?!”
The Metrobus projects have become the one-size-fits-all example of the N League’s misplaced priorities. No talking head on the media has abstained from using them as a rhetorical device. Whether it is lack of a hospital or school — or, on a sports programme, lack of government support for, say, competitive swimming — everything can be explained away by citing the Metrobus.
Consider the harrowing accident of the oil container that took place in Ahmedpur Sharqia the other day. The government was in the crosshairs, as was to be expected. But let us now closely inspect that incident. First of all, the accident itself. Well, till we get driverless cars, there is no way such accidents can completely stop. Then, there were the people nearby, who started scavenging for oil. It would be easy to be judgmental about them — as many in the media were — but since no one but the poor can truly understand how, exactly, poverty alters the rational calculus of an individual, one should refrain from commenting on that.
Now these two incidents — the tanker’s accident and the people scavenging for oil — could not be pinned on the government. And that state of affairs, of course, was unacceptable. So the lack of a burns unit nearby was what the government was hit with.
Before we go into the debate about the burns centre, let us return to the topic of the Metrobus. Prominent in the talking points of the pundits was the opinion that there are no burns units because the government keeps building Metrobus projects! Much like the very specific requirements of a medieval witch, who demands for her cauldron the fingernails of a child who has seen but nine summers, those advocating for (in this case) a burns unit feel that it is specifically that money, only those very currency notes, that have been spent on a Metrobus project that could be utilised for a burns unit. Nothing other than that. Never will we hear a plea curtailing the military budget to that effect. Or cutting down spending on shrines and mosques. Or diverting some of the existing health budget to a burns unit. No, the one-point agenda is that the damn Metrobus project should go.
On the issue of the burns centre: burn victims are presently treated at ICUs in big hospitals. That is not the sufficient medical care that third degree burns victims require. The care needs to take place in an environment even more sterile than a standard ICU.
Having a burns unit is an expensive proposition. So what, you might ask. The Punjab CM has a penchant for vanity projects. He has a string of shiny new medical establishments dotting the Punjab so he could build more burns centres as well. There is a relatively recently constructed one in Multan, isn’t there? Yes, but are burns units the optimal utilisation of said healthcare budget?
There should definitely be more burns units, but should there be burns units in peripheries like Ahmedpur Sharqia? Ideally, yes. But, since at any given point in time, there are going to be only so many third degree burn cases in a particular area, would these expensive units be lying dormant?
There are no right and wrong answers here. The reader might think yes, there should be. And, as long as the reader understands that the expenditure so incurred is going to be at the expense of, say, units helping in the fight against hepatitis or lung disease, he or she is entitled to hold that view.
But the debate on public health in the media should not be one long, uninformed blanket condemnation. In the terrible bomb blast at Sehwan Sharif this year, critics of the PPP were quick to point out on the talk shows that there was no medical facility anywhere near the place. That was completely incorrect as there was a neat facility nearby; it was only unable to cope with the scope of the tragedy. This inability to deal with tragedies of a large scale applies to big hospitals as well. In the bomb blast at Charing Cross in Lahore, the Ganga Ram Hospital, which is a large teaching hospital a stone’s throw from the location, was unable to deal with a tragedy of this scale and patients had to be sent over to the Mayo Hospital. Some cases even had to be sent to Jinnah Hospital.
The way the bigger cities of the country need mass transit projects to remain liveable, there needs to be immense expenditure on public health. But that should be informed by a healthy, reasonable debate, not in a condemnation of the incumbent government, wherever it is. But far from expecting such maturity from the media, the various political parties governing the different federating units also resort to cheap point-scoring when they are not “it.”