KOHAT, Sept 15: NWFP Governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah has said the lack of human resources has put the country at the mercy of foreigners, who take away major part of the loans in salaries, but fail to plan projects according to the present and future needs of the nation.

“The government is making efforts to put things on the right track, by bringing education on top of its agenda which, I believe, will solve seventy per cent of our social and health problems,” he remarked.

Speaking at the foundation-laying ceremony of Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospital here on Sunday, the governor announced a grant of Rs5 million for the first phase of the hospital.

The total cost, including the infrastructure and machinery for the 75-bed eye hospital, the third in the country, is projected to be Rs300 million.

The hospital will be constructed and supervised by the E-in-C branch of Pakistan army and be ready for commissioning in 2005.

He regretted that in the past the governments wasted huge loans on ill-planned projects. That was why the country’s borrowing stood at $35 billion without any remarkable achievement being visible on the ground.

The donors also did not understand our requirements and gave us wrong advice. For example, billions of rupees were spent on the basic health units in the far-flung areas where no doctor wanted to be posted.

All this was done at the cost of the main district hospitals which remained ill-equipped, short of staff and medicines, thus putting an extra burden on the provincial level hospitals, he said.

“Now we are strengthening the district level hospitals and trying to provide them with every modern facility and specialist needs. This would be followed up by the provision of complete health-care facilities in the tehsil hospitals,” the governor said.

Earlier, Lt-Gen Jehandad Khan, chairman Al-Shifa Trust, in his inaugural address, highlighted the achievements made by his organisation during the first decade plan.

He said it was the third hospital of its kind which would cater to the needs of the Fata, south-western Punjab, the NWFP and Afghanistan.

He disclosed that they had received an invitation from the governor of Herat, where Al-Shifa held a number of camps for the free treatment of eye patients, to visit the area and construct a hospital there.

He said that initially the Trust has agreed to train the doctors serving in the Al-Noor Eye Hospital in Kabul, and later a fully-fledged hospital would be set up in Afghanistan.

Giving details of the services provided at the Al-Shifa Trust Hospitals, he revealed that 500-600 patients’ checkup and 60-70 operations were carried out daily.

The trust spent more than Rs700 million during the last decade on the treatment of patients.

The recurrent expenditure of the hospital services was Rs120 million annually, 40 per cent of which came through donations, 35 per cent generated from own resources, whereas 25 per cent came through Zakat.

Of the 2.8 million blind people in the country, 80 per cent could be cured, he said. “Al-Shifa treated three million eye patients and operated upon 200,000 people with complicated cases during the last ten years.”

He said the hospital would be completed in three phases. In the first phase, the infrastructure, OPD and diagnosis, in the second, ophthalmology institute for the training of doctors, paramedics and nurses, and in the third, a research centre offering M.Phil and Ph.D in different fields of eye treatment.

A WHO representative informed the participants that Al-Shifa had successfully brought down the average blindness in the country, down from 1.7 per cent to below one per cent.