Delhi's private hospitals give cold shoulder to the poor : This startling revelation was revealed by a Delhi government's reply to an RTI application.

India Today: New Delhi: Saturday, 03 October 2015.

No country for the poor, is what the National capital is fast becoming so far as access to quality healthcare goes. This startling revelation was revealed by a Delhi government's reply to an RTI application.

According to the reply, the Delhi government has informed that all such private hospitals in Delhi that are obligated to treat Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) patients in lieu of having allotted government land in cheap rates, admitted a measley number of such patients per year since 2010. According to Delhi government records the city has got 42 such hospitals.

In response to an RTI filed by the India chapter of corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI), the Directorate of Health Services informed that since January 2010, all these hospitals had treated 500 to 850 such patients in an average every year till 2014 their in patient departments (IPD). From January to May this year, they treated around nine patients on an average from the economically weaker sections of the society.

Another shocking RTI revelation revealed that these hospitals had almost failed to cater to the poor sections of government servants. From April 2011 to March 2015 the number of patients from C and D groups of government servants who got treatment at these 42 hospitals in their OPD was 4, 27, 18, 26 and 35 in the corresponding years. Interestingly, only 2 patients of these classes were treated in the IPDs of these hospitals in 2010-11; 7 in 2011-12; 1 and 2 in the subsequent years; and none between April 2014 to March 2015.

While Class C includes head clerks and section heads, police head constables, army havildars among others, Class D includes manual workers, lower division clerks, drivers to name a few.

Ironically, the Directorate of Health Services has denied having any knowledge of the number of such private hospitals which got land at subsidised rates from the government and that they were under obligation to treat EWS patients free of cost.

While Mail Today contacted several of these hospitals, such as Max Hospital, Rockland Hospital and Apollo Hospital, they refused to comment. TI also told Mail Today that they had also written to Delhi's health minister Satyendra Jain, but got no response from him. "We wrote to the minister highligting these problems on August 5, but we have not heard from him since," said Ashutosh Kumar Mishra, Executive Director of TI-India.

"This is an extremely sad situation where these patients are denied treatment in hospitals, though the condition is now improving in some of the hospitals," EWS Monitoring Committee member Ashok Aggarwal told Mail Today.