Mumbai: In early January 2021, 10 infants were killed in a fire at a special newborn care unit of the Bhandara District Hospital in eastern Maharashtra. The state government promptly held the hospital administration responsible and set up a panel to ascertain the fire’s root cause.
The panel, which included former Maharashtra fire service director P.S. Rahangdale, divisional commissioner (Nagpur) Sanjeev Kumar and health service director Sadhana Tayade, subsequently suspended several hospital staff and initiated criminal action for negligence against some.
The state government also reassessed its existing fire safety protocol and conducted a long-overdue audit of state-run hospitals. Its primary goal was to avert similar mishaps in the future.
In the eleven months since the incident, and some six months since the panel’s recommendations, at least six more cases of fire inside hospitals have been reported across Maharashtra, killing at least 55 people and grievously injuring several others. The panel’s recommendations, it would seem, have stayed on paper.
The most recent hospital fire was on November 6, in which 11 people admitted to the Ahmednagar district hospital died.
The panel had recommended setting up an in-house fire response team at each hospital, and another team, with a warden overlooking fire safety measures, on each floor – in every district hospital, primary health centre and other tertiary care setups.
But a senior health official admitted to The Wire that the state had set aside no money to implement this recommendation, among others, in most districts.
In fact, the state is also yet to create a position for ‘fire officers’ across the state. After the disaster last week, state health minister Rajesh Tope had said at a press briefing that fire officers were compulsory in every health centre and that a dedicated response team should exist as well.
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The panel’s recommendations already included this measure, rendering the minister’s idea six months delayed.
Even the Bhandara District Hospital, the accident at which created the panel and its subsequent recommendations, has not received fire safety equipment that the state had promised.
“Among the many recommendations, the most immediate proposed were resetting the newborn care unit, which had been destroyed in the fire, and installation of a fire-fighting system meant to tackle such large-scale fires in future,” a senior member of the hospital’s administrative staff told The Wire. “Neither of them has been provided to us so far.”
A senior official in the state’s health department confirmed that the recommendations – which require funds to be drawn from each district’s public works department – are yet to be released in most districts.
The direct impact of the delay manifested as the fire, sparked by faulty electrical wiring, in the Ahmednagar District Hospital on November 6, in which 11 persons – all with severe COVID-19 – were killed. The area where the fire spread was a COVID-ward and had 17 patients on that day.
Soon after, the state government suspended Ahmednagar district civil surgeon Dr Sunil Pokharna, medical officers Dr Suresh Dhakne and Dr Vishakha Shinde, and staff nurse Sapna Pathare. The services of two staff nurses, Asma Shaikh and Channa Anant, were also terminated. All of them except Dr Pokharna been arrested under sections 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code.
Those visibly responsible may have been taken to task – but what of those at the more powerful decision-making positions?
The Bhandara incident prompted Ahmednagar district officials to draw up a plan worth over Rs 5 crore. It stipulated installing fire-fighting systems in all primary health centres and in civil hospitals. But the corresponding file hasn’t moved out of the state public health department, an official in the Ahmednagar hospital’s administration, told The Wire.
“The hospital staff can’t do much without adequate funds,” the official said. The official is also likely to face a departmental inquiry after the November 6 tragedy.
State health infrastructure, especially in rural India, has been a never-ending concern. Dinanath Waghmare, convenor of Sangharh Vahini, an NGO working with the very-marginalised denotified tribes and nomadic tribes in the state, said Maharashtra has failed to care for its poor citizens.
He had petitioned the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court seeking better care facilities in state-run hospitals; it remains pending.
“It is essentially the poor who avail medical care at state-run facilities,” Waghmare said. “The rich can afford better facilities. By ignoring basic safety measures, the state is making it clear that it doesn’t care for its marginalised people.”
According to him, the Bhandara panel’s recommendation has also been submitted to the court, including its 15 major points. In Waghmare’s telling, they are nothing exceptional. “But even the most basic safety facilities are missing” on the ground. “Imagine – the state has to set up a panel to state the most obvious things.”