A scam in bed allocation? Bangalore was caught off-guard by the second wave. But Tejaswi Surya was a wave all by himself. This was a different virus.
Bangalore South MP Tejasvi Surya has been in the news all week with his “expose” of a bed-blocking racket in the city’s hospitals. Amid the spike in Covid cases, beds were being reserved in the name of patients without their knowledge, and then unblocked and sold at hefty rates, Surya alleged on May 4. This had come to light after the 30-year-old MP and his team found a pattern of booking and cancellations in the data on bed allocation.
But the expose veered off at a tangent with a viral video of Surya—the national president of the BJP’s Yuva Morcha known for his frequent controversial comments—swooping down on his zonal war-room and confronting the official-in-charge. Surya read out the names of 16 staffers—all of them Muslims—while a city MLA accompanying him was heard asking the official if they were hiring for a madrassa or for the city corporation. WhatsApp messages with this list of names started doing the rounds, branding them as ‘killers of thousands of Bengalurians’. The police, who had started a probe into the bed-allotment irregularities, also questioned them.
Why were these people chosen from about 205 employees in the war-room, mostly hired through a staffing agency? Activists and the Opposition accused Surya of bringing in a communal angle, not to mention harassment of the staff. By the end of the week, the war-room asked them to resume work.
In his press conference this week, Surya was left fumbling for words when journalists posed pointed question, though he argued that he had “made no accusation of criminal liability” against the staffers. He claimed the list pertained to employees under restructuring or removal and was given to him by a senior official, and that he was merely enquiring about the hiring process.
All this did bring the government’s focus onto the disarray in the bed-allocation system. Corrective steps have now been put in place, while the police have made four arrests and are on the trail of touts who were exploiting the loopholes. By most accounts, the sudden surge in cases—compared to about 5,000 daily cases during the peak last year, Bangalore was clocking upwards of 20,000 cases daily this April—caught the civic body Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) off-guard. As resources on the ground were woefully inadequate to deal with it, it fell back on a tele-triaging method with the resultant mess over bed allocations.
Now, the civic body has flipped back to a decentralised physical triage, which will take place in every ward so that beds can be managed efficiently. Step-down wards are also being created to ensure that ICU and High Dependency Unit (HDU) beds are freed up for more patients. Over the past month, beds available in the government quota have risen from 3,000 to nearly 12,000, but there is still a shortage of oxygenated beds and ICU/HDU beds.
Meanwhile, over the past week, the online bed management software has been tweaked to plug gaps. “The audit trails are much stronger. Anyone can come and see the actual processes at any point of time,” says Kumar Pushkar, nodal officer for BBMP’s Central Hospital Bed Management System. Surya said other new measures like auto-generated SMSes to patients about bed allotments would curb misuse. “Our aim was not to target any person, but to reform the system,” he told reporters.
By Ajay Sukumaran in Bangalore