Celebrating the golden jubilee year in 2013, the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research went all gung-ho about starting robotic surgery by September last year, but the Rs 20 crore robotic equipments still lie packed in the corridors.
Failing many deadlines the PGI authorities kept on promising new timelines about starting the minimally invasive robotic surgery; however, the current space of construction suggests that Rome is still too far.
The contract for the construction work has been given to various contractors taking care of civil, air-conditioning and plumbing works. The civil and air-conditioning work are almost complete but the National Building Construction Corporation which has undertaken the plumbing work is lagging behind.
Sources in the engineering department said that the site recommended for installing the robotic surgery facility in the Nehru Hospital is far from completion. Reason: earlier the facility had internal public health shafts and few of them started leaking. The pre-requisite for a robotic surgery center is to have a leak proof facility and hence it was decided to move the shafts out.
There were a total nine shafts, which were to be installed externally for draining water and the work of reinstallation started in December 2013. Six months since the work started only six shafts has been installed externally, said sources in the engineering department.
So if we go by the current lackadaisical approach rate, there are three shafts which require re-installation and it might take three months more. Meanwhile, the robotic surgery equipments, packed in card-board boxes, are gathering dust in the corridors.
The robotic surgery equipments were bought for the department of Urology. A doctor in the department on the condition of anonymity said, “The department procured the machines in haste without preparing a proper installation site. It is a year now that the machines were bought for a whopping Rs 20 crore and they are still lying unused.”
He further said that this is wastage of public money as technology evolves very fast these days and if the facility would have been built first and then the machines would have been bought, we could have got a better deal.