BENGALURU: Rural Development Minister Priyank Kharge on Sunday criticised the previous BJP government for allegedly profiteering during the Covid pandemic and under-reporting deaths during the pandemic.
He said the scale of corruption could be in the range of Rs 3,000 crore. He was speaking a day after parts of a report by the Justice Michael D’Cunha’s commission, constituted to probe the alleged Covid scam, were leaked. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Health Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao revealed on Saturday that the report implicates former chief minister BS Yediyurappa and then health minister B Sriramulu.
Kharge said that during the initial days of Covid, the BJP government on March 17, 2020 sanctioned Rs 416.48 crore for medical supplies. On March 18, the Health Department’s Need Assessment Committee decided to procure 1.2 million PPE kits at Rs 2,117.53 per unit. The commerce and industries department claimed that Big Pharmaceutical and DHB Global Hong Kong quoted these inflated prices.
Officials wanted transparency, suggesting three different price options — yet their concerns were swept aside. Yediyurappa and Sriramulu allegedly okayed the overpriced deal. On April 2, Yediyurappa ordered 1,00,000 kits from DHB Global at Rs 2,117.53 per kit, costing Rs 21.18 crore, he alleged.
On April 10, two more direct orders were placed with DHB Global and Big Pharmaceutical, for buying three lakh PPE kits for Rs 62.57 crore, he said. He asked, “Why did the BJP’s government buy from China? Just days before, Karnataka State Medical Supply Corporation had purchased kits locally at Rs 330.40 per kit which is seven times cheaper.”
The government splurged an additional Rs 12 crore on transportation and paid the entire amount in advance to a barely established Chinese company, DHB Global, which vanished after Covid, the minister alleged.
More chilling is that the Directorate of Economics and Statistics recorded 2.29 lakh deaths in Karnataka in the first half of 2020, which surged to 4.26 lakh by mid-2021. Yet, the BJP government claimed only 37,206 deaths due to Covid, concealing around 120,000 lives lost, he said.
“This is not just corruption; it’s mass negligence for profit. The Congress government will seek justice for every life lost to BJP’s corruption,” he said.