By IANS,
Islamabad: The funds collected in the Pakistani prime minister’s fund for flood relief are just peanuts, said a daily Saturday.
Floods in Sindh province have impacted over seven million people with almost half a million people being accommodated in over 2,500 camps. As many as 1.3 million homes have been damaged and six million acres of land were inundated.
An editorial in the News International said: “There had been widespread doubt in the national media that the prime minister’s fund for flood relief would attract much interest, and so it has proved.
“Thus far it has received less than Rs.100 million – just over a million dollars – and calling such a sum ‘peanuts’ does a disservice to that humble foodstuff.”
It said that the majority of that collected comes from official sources such as the National Bank of Pakistan where “people have donated a miserable Rs.0.5 million”.
“Government officials are a little shy of discussing how much has been donated, presumably because it is the clearest possible evidence of just how little the public trusts anything that puts the words ‘government’ and ‘money’ in the same sentence,” it noted.
“There is a similar reticence about how much international donors have given, and the reason is as plain as the nose on one’s face. The current dispensation has a national and international reputation of being one of the most corrupt regimes in the history of the state,” the editorial added.