New Delhi: Lieutenant governor VK Saxena accused AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal of "depriving" lakhs of people in Delhi of the benefits of Ayushman Bharat healthcare scheme due to "fear" that its implementation would expose the falsity of the health model he was promoting.
In a long post in Hindi on X, Saxena said he doesn't take cognisance of Kejriwal's "baseless" statements, but the matter this time related to a "people-oriented" scheme of the central govt, which "benefited" crores of Indians. Saxena said that the then Delhi health minister had approved the rolling out of Ayushman scheme in Aug 2018, but Kejriwal opposed it because he wanted his name to be associated with it.
"...Your govt talked about naming the Ayushman Bharat scheme as ‘Chief Minister Aam Aadmi Health Insurance Scheme Ayushman Bharat'," Saxena alleged in his post. He claimed that the central govt agreed on the sole condition that the name of CM was used after ‘Ayushman Bharat', but Kejriwal, due to "narcissism and hunger for publicity", did not allow its implementation to date.
LG called Delhi govt's health model a "web of illusion" created by Kejriwal's "powerful propaganda machinery". He alleged that AAP govt intentionally "withheld" the CAG reports on the health department, fearing it would expose the reality of this model. "Delhi might be the only place where the court had to order the health minister to appear personally to ensure medicines were available for the public. It might be the only place where the court had to order a major govt hospital to repair its CT-scan machine," the LG posted.
Saxena slammed Delhi govt for not revising the essential drug list since 2013, which, he alleged, caused a "severe shortage" of medicines and "rampant corruption" in hospitals. He claimed ventilators, CT scans and X-ray machines in state-run hospitals were non-functional and pathology labs did not operate in accordance with regulations. The LG claimed that 24 city hospitals were being constructed without provisions for the appointment of 38,000 doctors and healthcare staff while CBI was investigating mohalla clinics.
With no hospital management information system, no centralised data was available on vacant beds, OPD crowding or patient care, he said. "If you visit AIIMS, Safdarjung, RML or Sir Ganga Ram hospitals in Delhi, you'll easily understand how Ayushman Bharat benefits citizens in other states," the LG said, adding that the implementation of Delhi govt's health model nationally would result in "chaos, corruption and patients' neglect".