Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari launches a new free-treatment hospital as Sindh promises wider healthcare access, clean drinking water and a major sewerage overhaul.
LARKANA, Nov 7 (Focus Pakistan) - Six hundred beds. Free treatment. A 2028 deadline. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari made those promises as he laid the foundation stone for a 600-bed hospital in Larkana that will serve the city and the poor districts that ring it.
Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah stood beside Bilawal, who holds Larkana’s seat in the National Assembly. Project Director Yasir Bhatti walked both leaders through the plans.
Bilawal traced the idea back to a visit to Chandka Hospital after Larkana’s voters sent him to parliament. The hospital dates from the 1970s, he said, and its planners designed it for a far smaller population. Today it takes in patients from Larkana and a string of nearby cities.
The record supports him. Chandka’s own administrators put it at 1,500 beds and call it the biggest teaching hospital in upper Sindh. Patients reach it from Balochistan, and some from Punjab. Until May 2025, its intensive care unit had just six to eight beds, and a 50-bed ICU opened only then.
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The new hospital aims to take some of that load. The plans the chief minister approved last December describe a six-storey building with a basement. It will go up in two phases and run as a 600-bed tertiary care centre. The provincial government put the cost at roughly Rs3 billion.
The clock has already moved
The timeline has already slipped once. In December, officials told the chief minister the hospital would take two years to build, and they scheduled the groundbreaking for March 2026. The ceremony came eight months after that date. Two years from December 2025 meant late 2027. The new date is 2028.
Kidney patients got a mention too. Residents, Bilawal said, could also turn to the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation for treatment. SIUT already runs a dialysis centre in the city, which Bilawal opened in 2021. The provincial government has set aside Rs4.5 billion for a full SIUT hospital in Larkana. The institute has committed to free kidney care there on the model of its Karachi headquarters.
That project carries a deadline of its own. Bilawal announced last year that a large SIUT hospital would rise in Larkana by 2027.
The PPP chairman also turned to the city’s water. Work has begun to restore and expand the Ratodero water supply scheme, he said. The sewers come next. Officials plan to upgrade the network so it can cope with Larkana for another 25 years.
In a separate meeting at Bhutto House in Naudero, the talk turned to drains. Sohail Qureshi, the public health engineering secretary, said his department had finished the feasibility study for Larkana’s water supply, sewerage and rainwater drainage project. The goal is clean drinking water in every home in the city within two years. Shahdadkot sits further along. Its sewerage scheme is half done, and officials say the rest will wrap up next year.
Bilawal closed on education. Sindh now gives its universities Rs45 billion, he said, and the province plans to raise that figure.
Larkana now has two dates to hold the government to: 2027 for SIUT and 2028 for the 600-bed hospital. Chandka’s overstretched wards will show whether either date holds.
