BHOPAL: NGOs working with the survivors of Bhopal gas disaster have written to chairman of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee, Justice V K Agrawal, drawing his attention towards problems faced by the gas victims in registration at Bhopal Memorial Hospital & Research Centre (BMHRC) for treatment particularly if they don’t have a smart card.
The hospital refuses to register gas victim patients if there is some anomaly or typo mistake in the court order for compensation and their name or some other details like father’s name or husband’s name in the court order doesn’t tally with the name in their Aadhaar card or voter I-card. Stating that it has become a routine for the registration department to deny admission to extremely sick gas victims visiting the hospital, representative for four NGOs working among the gas victims, Rachna Dhingra said it happens when the gas victim visiting BMHRC doesn’t have a smart card and brings the copies of their final order for the purpose of identification.
Citing an example, she said that a gas victim Rehana visited the hospital on August 23, due to chest pain. Since she doesn’t have a smart card, she had brought copies of the compensation order.
Since she was not married at the time when the order was passed, it carried her father’s name and not husband. But, in her Aadhaar card, which was made after she got married, her husband’s name was registered instead of her father. The hospital refused to admit her in the hospital until she proved that she was the same Rehana, who had received the gas compensation. This has happened with Rehana twice in the past as well, Rachna wrote.
Talking to TOI, she said that it’s a routine practice at BMHRC and if a Mahira has been misspelled as Mahir or something else in the order copy due to typographic error, which is very common, they are denied free treatment.
She further said that it’s absolutely unethical on the part of BMHRC management to refuse admission to a serious gas victim on such a flimsy ground, she said that the apex court had mandated smart card for all gas victims but it was provided to only 3.5 lakh gas victims only..
Besides, to avoid such glitches they can download the list of gas victims compensated by the court from the gas welfare commissioner office but they seem more interested in turning away gas victims, rather than laying down a clear SOP for identification of gas victims, she said.
Rehana’s husband said that though they have admitted his wife for treatment but they are still not considering her a gas victim. “They gave us the names of eight documents and asked us to bring any three of them to establish her identity as a gas victim. We have given them all the documents that we could lay our hands on. They have now said that they would let us know on Monday whether she can be treated free of cost as a gas victim or not.”
Member of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee, Purnendu Shukla, said that the committee has received the complaint from the NGOs as well as the patient Rehana.The hospital management has been asked to respond. He admitted that complaints of this nature from gas victims have been common since the inception of BMHRC and yet the hospital management has not been able to address the issue.
