Daily Times

DIR: The Standing Committee of Khyber Pakhtonkhwa (KP) Assembly on relief, rehabilitation and settlement has asked the district administration of Upper Dir to present all the record of October 2015’s earthquake approved and rejected applications before the next assembly meeting.

The standing committee held its meeting in Wari with Chairman Muhammad Ali presided the meeting. Deputy Commissioner of Upper Dir Muhammad Usman Mehsud, MPAs Bakht Baidar and Sahibzada Sanaullah, AC Wari and others also attended the meeting.

Muhammad Ali said that the committee was doing inquiry on the Sanaullah resolution which had been tabled in the KP assembly regarding irregularities in the compensatory cheques and rejected applications of the deserved affected people.

He said that the committee will do comparison between the accepted applications and the rejected applications. “We will check the criteria of accepted applications and also check that on what criteria applications had been rejected,” said Muhammad Ali.

He said that they had discussed the matter in detailed at all dimensions, adding the committee had also directed the tehsil Wari and district administrations to present the missing record of the thousands missing forms before the next committee meeting in Peshawar. Mr Ali said that the committee had also asked Sanaullah to present solid proofs about his allegation of given 13 compensatory cheques to one family in Dir if he had some solid evidences.

Muhammad Ali said that he had kept two options before the committee members for solving the issue, adding the first option is, to conduct an impartial inquiry in all the 32 union councils of the Upper Dir district and make recoveries from non-deserved persons who had claimed compensatory amount without any political like and dislike and the second one is, demand from provincial government for additional grant for the deprived deserving earthquake affected people. He said that the other committee members had not yet decided to take which option. “I will personally go for second option because first may be create more problems rather than solving the issue,” said Muhammad Ali. Sources in the DC office said that more than 4000 approved forms were still kept pending due to lack of fund. Sources said that they had forwarded demands several times to provincial government for providing fund that could give to those remaining affected people. “The provincial government has yet to give us a green signal regarding additional grant,” the sources said. He in these circumstances they did not think that more fund could be provided for earthquake affected people, sources added.

Muhammad Ali said that the committee would present recommendations and demand of giving compensation amount to remaining deserved people after the addition of the genuine rejected applications and he however optimistic that the provincial will release additional grant for those remaining affected people.