Bengaluru: MP Tejasvi Surya said on Tuesday that nearly 4,056 hospital beds booked for Covid-19 patients have been diverted in return for bribes in the last week. He alleged a huge racket in bed allotment.
He demanded to take strict actions against the officials involved in this scam.
Surya is BJP youth wing’s national president and he made this state at a press conference and city BJP MLAs Ravi Subramanya, Satish Reddy and Uday Garudachar were also present with him.
Surya said that some BBMP officials, hospital staffers and people in zonal war rooms were involved. He said, “My party may be in administration, but we cannot sit quietly looking at this level of corruption that has led to many deaths. I apologise to the families of people who died because of this unholy nexus. We cannot bring back those who have died, but we want to prevent more people from dying.”
Surya said about the scam that beds were booked under the name of patients who were in home isolation. He said, “After the bed is booked if the patient doesn’t get admitted in 12 hours, it is automatically unblocked for other patients. In this 12 hour window, agents contact patients looking for admission and divert the beds to them. We contacted multiple people in whose names beds were blocked and found that they had recovered long back. They were not aware that beds were booked in their name.” Not only this, ICU and ventilator beds were also given to those who were willing to pay the bribe.
Surya also affirmed, “A bed gets vacant at midnight, and it is blocked in the next two minutes. And in the next 30 seconds, the patient gets admitted there. How can a patient reach the place in 30 seconds?”
He also said that there were incidents when a single patient’s BU number was used to book beds. He stated, “A person was in home isolation. But in the war room, they had booked beds in 12 hospitals in 12 days using the same BU number. All these things happened 20 days after the patient’s recovery.”
He added that BBMP jas failed to use technology. He said, “There are two software programs. On one, calls are taken to check the details. The person collecting the information passes it on to another person, who books it (bed) on the second program. There is no integration between the programs, and it shows the shoddy job of BBMP. We live in the IT capital.”
He also said that there were a set of people who were reserving beds for important people such as ministers, MLAs and MPs. Gaurav Gupta, BBMP chief commissioner said that they were looking into this matter and will submit a report on Wednesday. He added, “I have directed them to fix issues parallelly. Any glitches that are misused will be fixed. Action will be taken against anyone who indulged in fraudulent activities.”
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