NEW DELHI: Health Minister Saurabh Bhardwaj, in a letter to CM Arvind Kejriwal, has alleged that a conspiracy is being hatched to neutralise the AAP government’s ‘Farishtey Dilli Ke’ scheme. The minister said that for the past 1.5 years, payments for the bills of those private hospitals that treated accident victims under the scheme have not been made.
The minister stated that it’s a deliberate attempt to stop private hospitals from treating accident victims due to a lack of funds, causing inconvenience to Delhi people. “Under this scheme if any individual meets with an accident while walking on the road and gets admitted to a nearby private hospital, the entire treatment cost is covered by the Delhi government.
He said that the scheme was initiated on January 15, 2018, and since then, it has saved the lives of over 23,000 people. However, under a calculated conspiracy, efforts have been made to halt the Farishtey scheme for nearly the past year.”
In January 2023, the health minister said, when the health department brought to the notice of the then Deputy CM Manish Sisodia that Delhi government is owed approximately Rs 24.5 crore by private hospitals in Delhi, the Deputy CM wrote a letter to the Director- General of Health Services (DGHS) on January 24, 2023, asking for information about when these outstanding dues would be paid.
He requested that a timeline be provided to him. Surprisingly, no response was given to the Deputy CM. Bharadwaj continued that, subsequently, in March, the responsibility of the Health Ministry was assigned to him. As soon as he received information about this, he called a meeting on April 21, concerning this matter. Both the Health Secretary and DGHS, Nutan Mundeja, were present at this meeting.
Shockingly, when he asked the officials in the meeting how much money private hospitals and laboratories owed by the Delhi government, he was officially told that no dues were pending, and all these details are recorded in the minutes of the meeting that took place that day. The minister mentioned, “Once again, complaints were filed by private hospitals on this matter.
So, in connection to these complaints, I once again wrote a letter to the Health Secretary on May 9, 2023. I questioned why the payments for their bills were being made arbitrarily. I asked why the bills for hospitals the department favored were being processed, while bills for hospitals it did not favor were not being processed. This is incorrect.”