CHITRAL: A significant technical and administrative impasse has emerged regarding the outsourcing of the Booni tehsil headquarters (THQ) hospital in Upper Chitral district, raising concerns that residents could be denied upgraded healthcare facilities despite the provincial government spending hundreds of millions of additional rupees.
A source in the health department told Dawn that the complications arose after the secondary healthcare facility was upgraded from a category ‘D’ to a category ‘C’ establishment shortly after its management was auctioned off to a private bidder. He said the provincial authorities had originally advertised the facility as a category ‘D’ hospital as a result of which a Shangla-based private organisation successfully won the contract.
The source, however, said due to lingering technical delays, the private entity had not yet formally taken control of the facility when the provincial government formally upgraded its status to category ‘C’.
He said the transition to a category ‘C’ hospital drastically changed the operational scope, human resources and funding of the healthcare facility.
There are fears that residents could be denied upgraded services
“Under the revised criteria, the Booni hospital is now entitled to nine additional medical specialists, 20 each medical officers and nursing staff members apart from an expanded strength of paramedical staff as well as a substantially larger budget for life-saving medicines and diagnostic laboratory paraphernalia,” he said.
The source said the handing over of the facility under the terms of the original category ‘D’ agreement would mean depriving the people of Upper Chitral of those vital category ‘C’ services.
He said the crux of the technical glitch lay in the financial clauses of the existing contract as per which, the provincial government was legally bound to transfer the entire budgetary allocation of the hospital directly to the private party.
“If the contract is executed as originally signed, the private operator would receive the vastly inflated category ‘C’ budget while only being contractually obligated to provide lower-tier category ‘D’ healthcare services,” he said.
The source said that despite the massive financial and public service implications, the health department had not yet initiated any official action to review or amend the agreement.
He said bureaucratic inertia had left the contract unaligned with the hospital’s new status, stalling the deployment of upgraded medical personnel and advanced diagnostic equipment to the remote region. Local civil society members have previously raised alarms over the region’s crumbling healthcare infrastructure and said the delay in resolving this contractual discrepancy threatened to further prolong the wait for adequate emergency and specialist healthcare in Upper Chitral.
They said senior officials in the health department were reportedly “reviewing the legal pathways to amend the contract terms, though no formal timeline has been given for when the Shangla-based organisation will modify its operational plan to accommodate the Category ‘C’ mandates”.
Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2026
