Chandigarh: Senior Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader Bikram Singh today said the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government was playing with the lives of people by diverting primary health services from 50 per cent of the State’s population to indulge in a PR exercise to revive the party’s sinking ship in Punjab.
Addressing a press conference here, Bikram Majithia said the entire exercise had the makings of a massive scam and demanded an independent probe into the issue. He also disclosed that the SAD would approach Punjab Governor Banwarilal Purohit soon and urge him to order a probe into the scam, besides directing the Aam Aadmi Party not to use government schemes to project itself.
The SAD leader also registered a strong protest at the manner in which the names of five satellite centres established in the memory of the Panj Pyaras in 1999 during the 300th anniversary celebrations of the birth of the Khalsa by former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, had been defaced by putting chief minister Bhagwant Mann’s picture along with the nomenclatural of Aam Aadmi Clinic. He said even after strong protests registered by the sangat, the AAP government had only added the names of the Panj Pyaras in a strip with the focus still remaining on the chief minister‘s picture.
Launching a frontal attack on AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal, Majithia said the former had announced in 2019 that AAP did not believe in changing names but in making lives better. “However in Punjab, the party is doing the opposite. It first turned hundred Seva Kendra buildings into Mohalla Clinics. Now it has turned 500 primary health Centre buildings into Aam Aadmi Clinics. Asserting that public money had been needlessly wasted in this process, Majithia said it was shocking that the government wanted to spend Rs.30 crore on publicising the project for which it had spent only Rs.10 crore.
Majithia also detailed how former health secretary Ajay Sharma, who had protested against this advertisement spend which envisaged advertising the scheme even in Tamil Nadu, had been shunted out of the health department. He also gave the example of how Aam Aadmi Clinics were being established in unsafe buildings while disclosing how a PHC established by former chief minister. Ram Kishen in 1966 had been turned into an Aam Aadmi Clinic.
Asserting that the health sector had been adversely affected by this move, Mr Majithia said as many as 540 rural dispensaries had been shut affecting health care in 6000 villages. He said around 1200 rural pharmacists and doctors had been affected and contractual staff, who had not received any hike since years, were on strike. He said all this was happening at a time when hospitals in Punjab were facing shortage of medicines and even syringes. He also condemned the AAP government for ending the free healthcare facility provided to cancer and hepatitis – c patients.
Asserting that the AAP government did not have the interest of Punjabis at heart, Majithia said “clinics
have been opened to showcase the scheme to woo voters in other states by painting a larger-than-life image of the scheme when the reality was that it was simply a paint