Peshawar is draped in red, green, and polio vaccination messages today. Roads and streets cloaked in banners, advertisements on television, awareness messages on radio: the Sehat Ka Insaf initiative of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI)-led government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is well and truly in full swing.

“There is political ownership of the immunisation drive — that is the greatest news for health in KP,” argued Jan Baz Afridi, Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) programme manager at the KP Health Department.

Launched on January 25, 2014 by PTI chief Imran Khan, the Sehat Ka Insaf drive is a concentrated attempt at immunizing children up to two years of age against nine crippling diseases. In its pilot phase, the drive spans 92 union councils of Peshawar, with the KP government intent on boosting the existing immunisation rate of 47 per cent in the province.

Polio vaccinations, used by militant groups as a premise to attack and kill health workers across the country, are part of but not the cornerstone of the larger immunisation drive. In practice, this translated into the PTI-led government shifting focus away from polio vaccinations to what Imran Khan termed the “criminal neglect of children’s health.”

In keeping with this ‘rebranding’, health department will provide free vaccinations against not just polio but eight other vaccine-preventable diseases: Tuberculosis, Diphtheria, Pertusis, Tetanus, Hepatitis B, Hemophilus Influenza, Pneumonia and Measles. The volunteer teams will now inoculate children against all these diseases.

The teams will also distribute public health messages door to door and give health vouchers for free medical checkups and free medicines to the patients. Each child will also receive vitamin A drops and each family will be given a hygiene kit that includes soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, towel, water container, etc.

This strategy seems to have been effective so far now and refusals have dropped from around 6,000 to 2,000.

They’ve made another break from the past as well. From 2009-2012, the provincial government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) had relied on the service of mullahs, who’d propagate messages of immunisation from the loudspeakers of mosques.

This practice received a setback after Dr Shakil Afridi was caught and tried on allegations that he helped the American government confirm Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad through a vaccine program. Ever since bin Laden’s death, various Taliban groups stepped up attacks on polio immunisation efforts, claiming that such drives were covers for spying programs. Whether they believed this or whether this was an excuse is another issue entirely.

The era of using mullahs now seems a bygone one, and the KP government has assumed all responsibility for the drive. Every Sunday, the provincial capital is immersed in the immunisation drive, traffic is diverted away from the localities concerned, and police officials are spared from other duties to concentrate on providing security to volunteers of the drive. Health workers are directed not to run the immunisation drive on other days of the week. Today is the fourth Sunday that the city is witnessing the drive.

The Sehat Ka Insaf drive is also unique in its procurement of vaccines: while the other three provinces rely on the Prime Minister’s Polio Cell, the KP government purchases vaccines directly.

Not all volunteers are trained health workers; some are also party members of the PTI. A total of 12,500 volunteers are to take part in the three-month drive; distributing free immunisation kits among 800,000 children of 30,000 families. Many PTI workers have volunteered for the Sehat Ka Insaf drive to earn extra income, as they also qualify for the daily payment given to health workers.

For others, such as 41-year-old trained health worker Mushtari, the wounds of the last targeted attack while on duty are still fresh. “In January 2012, the KP government increased our daily remuneration from Rs250 to Rs500. I was really happy since I have to raise my two sons. Then we got attacked,” she said.

“Unidentified gunmen fired at us when we were just entering a house to administer oral polio vaccines to children in Mardan. My colleague was shot dead while I ran and took refuge in a house. I am now afraid of resuming my job,” she said.

Mushtari, whose husband is a daily wager, isn’t alone in being scared off: some 32 persons, including lady health workers, volunteers and policemen protecting them, were targeted and killed since December 2012. “I know at least 200 people who withdrew from the polio campaign due to the Taliban’s reprisals,” she claimed.

Few or no immunisations meant that not only did the incidence of polio rise dramatically, but the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Peshawar as a “reservoir” of the polio virus. The WHO also warned that the virus was being transported through a dilapidated system of sewage drains.

Till now, Peshawar, Mardan, Swabi and Charsadda have emerged as high-risk districts of the province when it comes to polio immunisations. As the provincial government takes the Sehat Ka Insaf banner out of Peshawar and into other districts, starting April 21, it is worth remembering the haunting tale of Mushtari. As with the immunisation programme, it is people such as her who also need to be politically owned.