KARACHI: Despite the Sindh chief minister’s clear orders for polio vaccination in Karachi’s Gulberg area that produced the year’s sole case of the crippling disease in the city and in other districts as well, police again refused to provide security to vaccinators for the campaign planned for Thursday, but pledged to be available next week for their security, officials said on Thursday.
Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah had censured the police hierarchy last month for refusing to provide security to the health authorities to carry out a ‘mop-up’ campaign in the aftermath of the Gulberg case, which left the officials concerned puzzled as earlier they had been boasting about their efforts for keeping the city clean of the virus for around 12 months (from Oct 2014 to Oct 2015).
The three-day polio campaign supposed to start last Monday was to be deferred because of unavailability of the police for unexplained reasons and another four-day campaign scheduled for Thursday, which was planned during a meeting at Chief Minister House in which the chief minister had asked the Inspector General of Sindh police to place more than 3,000 policemen at the disposal of the polio campaigners, was cancelled again.
“Security is the only reason that caused us to cancel two of our campaigns — one was a mop-up campaign specific to Gulberg and the surrounding areas and another for the city’s three districts of south, west and central,” said a senior official in the provincial health ministry.
The officials in the health ministry and the police said that the senior police officials met the provincial emergency operations centre officials and a representative of the World Health Organisation.
Ironically, as a police spokesman claimed, the IG of Sindh police had asserted that providing security to polio volunteers was among their top priorities, but he did not explain the reasons that forced his organisation to not provide security for the scheduled campaigns.
He claimed that the police had everything ready to safeguard the volunteers and insisted that any impression showing that the police arrangements for the polio campaign security were incomplete was wrong.
The meeting participants have decided to launch a campaign next Monday in which 6,000 polio teams would take part.
The police IG promised to provide 3,200 policemen from the special security unit, the rapid response force, the crime branch, the counterterrorism department, the Sindh Reserve Police, the anti-encroachment cell and police training centres.
It is the second time that the police have looked the other way when the chief minister asked them to do something else.
Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2015