NEW DELHI: Noida rolls out a red carpet for multi-national companies, IT giants and industries to set up shop in the hi-tech hub, but when it comes to providing basic facilities, the authorities look the other way.
The city’s sole government hospital in Sector 30, Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital is in such a bad state that patients find it difficult to get primary health care. It was upgraded as a multi-specialty facility in 2011 with much fanfare to make it rival Delhi’s AIIMS. Expressing its inability to run a hospital, Noida Authority—which constructed it—has decided to hand it over to the Uttar Pradesh health department. The Noida Authority has an annual budget of Rs 9,000 crore.
“The authority is going to write to the state health department to take this away from us. We made the hospital, our basic work of setting it up is done. Now we are finding it difficult to run,” Rajesh Prakash, Additional Chief Executive Officer of Noida Authority, told The Sunday Standard.
Most of the victims of the 2,190 accidents on the Noida-Greater Noida Yamuna Expressway were taken to the district hospital, which referred them to Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital and Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital due to lack of proper medical facilities.
In 2011, during the tenure of chief minister Mayawati, Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital was shifted to Sector 30 from Sector 39. Under a new proposal, the state government decided to spend Rs 510 crore to transform it into a 300-bed hospital with modern equipment on the lines of AIIMS. Construction is still incomplete and the hospital has just 100 beds.
When the Samajwadi Party came to power in 2012, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav decided to divide the hospital into a child specialty hospital, a medical college and the existing clinic. Instead of an improvement of facilities, authorities focused all their attention to child specialty and revamp of the existing structure in Sector 39.
About the new hospital in Sector 39, an official said, “This construction is going to take at least three to four years to be fully functional. The district hospital, which was supposed to provide critical and basic health care at cheap prices, is not functioning. The hospital does not have an ICU, no burn ward and no laparoscopy service.”
There is one doctor per 300 patients in Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital’s OPD and on any given day, the 100-bed hospital has 150-200 patients admitted in its wards. A proposal to install CT scanners and MRI machines is pending with the state government. The total strength of the hospital is just 32, inquiries by The Sunday Standard revealed.
“Patient load is increasing and the number of beds remain the same. There is hardly any space left for expansion. Human resource is not availaible. Patients don’t understand these problems,” said Noida’s Chief Medical Superintendent Nagendra Mathur. The state health department provides all the manpower to Noida Authority, which runs the hospital.
“We have done what we are experts in, which is construction, but we have been unable to give the attention it needs. This dual policy of the state government providing manpower and letting us run the hospital is not working at all,” Prakash added.