PoGB: Locals in remote villages lose lives due to lack of medical infrastructure

Several people have lost their lives in remote villages of Pakistan-occupied Gilgit Baltistan (PoGB) due to zero accessibility through roads and lack of medical infrastructure, a local media outlet from PoGB, Markhor Times, reported.

The local village head said that many lives have been lost in the region due to the non-availability of medical facilities.

“Our community has been living here for more than 100 years. We have lost lots of lives because of having no medical facilities. We barely manage with wooden stretchers, we are forced to sometimes carry pregnant ladies. Most of the time either the mother dies or the child’s life is lost,” Markhor Times quoted local village head as saying.

“Not only mothers, we are sometimes forced to carry injured people and several of them have lost their lives in transit. The only medical personnel available to us who visit this village once in two to three months and to pay its medical expenses we gather donations of approximately PKR 20000 to give them,” the village head added.

Another local resident from the village stressed that zero medical infrastructure is just one part of the problem and termed education a major concern, according to Markhor Times report.

The local resident said, “Zero medical infrastructure infrastructure is just one part of the problem. Education is also a major concern. We barely have any educational infrastructure, there is a small school kilometres away from us and there is only one teacher and he also is struggling to provide education to the students in the valley. The teacher is trying to make the best out of what he has.”

In another report by the Markhor Times, a local resident of the region said, “The government is doing nothing for our valley. We haven’t seen any officials here, and we haven’t received any assistance from the local government. It has become very difficult for us to afford even one meal a day. They are even cutting down our forests. We don’t understand why this is happening”.

“Nothing is being done for us, and when we speak out about deforestation, we are threatened with imprisonment by government officials. We fear retaliation. Look at our conditions: there is no dispensary, and the roads are in poor shape. The lack of proper roads creates numerous problems for us,” he added.