Blaming the Uttarakhand Government for repeated strikes in the four Community Health Centres (CHC) of Raipur, Thathyud, Naugaon and Sahiya, the Managing Director (MD) of Rajbhara Medicare Private limited, Rajneesh Kashyap has said that long delays in releasing the pending payments precipitate the crisis.
Rajbhara is the private player which is operating these CHCs under Public Private Partnership (PPP) model. The functioning of these CHCs is plagued by the repeated strikes by their employees for salaries. The private player was on the receiving end for these strikes and charges of corruption.
Presenting his side of the story, Kashyap told media persons here on Wednesday that the pending payment with the State Government has mounted to `2.90 crores due which it is not in a position to pay salaries to the staff. The MD of Rajbhara showed data to claim that these hospitals performed excellently after their management was taken over by private player. He said that Rajhbhara did its best to provide specialist doctors in these CHCs and succeeded to some extent. He however added that delay in salaries prompted many of these specialist doctors to leave the job. The MD said that the State Government had only two obligations of providing monthly payments and medical equipments under the MoU, both of which it failed to provide. He alleged partisan behavior with the company as the other PPP player Sheel Medicare is continuing to get support of health department. “ I filed RTI requesting for information regarding time of invoices raised and payments with the health department to Rajbhara and Sheel but got no response,’’ Kashyap said. The MD however accepted that more revenue was demanded from the Government for the pathology tests last year due to system errors but added that the error was pointed out by the company itself. He said that the State Government has not cleared any invoice of the company since September 2015 and it appears that the Government expects Rajbhara Doctors and other staff to work with without salaries in the hard areas and not even utter a single word about salaries. Some of the doctors and the paramedic staff were also present in the press conference.
The State Government had signed a MoU with the company in the year 2013. last year citing discrepancies the Government had decided to terminate the contract against which the company went to the court. The staff members of these hospitals and the patients are the worst sufferers of this standoff between the company and Government. Meanwhile under-threat from the State Government the paramedic staff of these hospitals resumed work on Wednesday but the strike by the doctors continued.