For last so many years the Punjab government has been on an announcement spree about various social welfare schemes. But the announcements are way disproportionate to the implementation as nothing appears to have moved on the ground.
I am only referring to a few issues like the drug de-addiction, anti cancer, providing healthcare, old age benefits, widow and disability pensions and the basic education. The government has without any doubt or ambiguity failed on all counts. In the case of old age, widow and disability pensions the Punjab and Haryana High Court had to seek its answers as to why these were not paid for a period of over one year.
For last several months, the state government has raised a hue and cry over tackling the drug addiction problem that has hit our younger generation with devastating magnitude. In the last budget that was presented in July, the state government had promised to set up five state of art drug deaddiction centres at Bathinda, Faridkot, Patiala, Jalandhar and Amritsar. Besides, it had also promised to set up ten-bedded deaddiction centres at the existing 31 district and sub-divisional hospitals. It had also promised to set up Rehabilitation Centres, which are different from Deaddiction Centres, at all the district headquarters. Not a single brick has been moved anywhere.
Even the much hyped 100 bedded Cancer Diagnostic Treatment and Research Centre at Bathinda, which was supposed to start from March has not started as yet, despite being in Bathinda as the town gets special treatment from the state government.
Leave aside the super-specialised treatment centres, even the normal hospitals and dispensaries are crying for attention with virtually no doctors or drugs available in most of them.
Same is the case with education. The government schools, particularly those in the rural areas which are required to be more efficient as there is not much presence of private education there, have no infrastructure both in terms of buildings as well as teachers.
It is high time that the status of various welfare schemes of the state government are subjected to a thorough social audit and the findings brought out in a White Paper so that the government is held to account and not let off after merely making verbal announcements without any intent of delivery.