Bikram Majithia says Cong fight for top chair costing people dearly

Khanna: Former minister Bikram Singh Majithia today said the Congress party’s occupation in the fight for the top chair had claimed another life in that of DSP Harjinder Singh whose family’s pleas to chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh as well as the health and finance ministers to facilitate his lung transplant fell on deaf ears.

Mr Bikram Majithia was here to inaugurate the party’s Oxygen Sewa drive which is being undertaken by Yadwinder Singh Yadu.

The former minister asserted Punjabis were suffering because they had been left to their fate by the Congress government whose leaders were busy lobbying in Delhi to either dislodge the chief minister or keeping him in his chair. “Nothing is being done to help those in distress as was witnessed in the case of DSP Harjinder Singh whose file kept moving from one room to another. The situation is such that the mortality rate is highest in the medical college in Patiala, the hometown of the chief minister. Similarly, there is not a single ventilator in the government sector in Mohali, the constituency of Health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu, with all of them being gifted to private hospitals. It is due to this that we have lost more than 15,000 lives”.

Mr Bikram Majithia said the vaccine and Fateh kit scams also symbolized the total insensitivity of the Congress government. “Nothing is sacred. They have even chosen to play with the lives of people by earning ill gotten money from vaccines and medicines meant for Covid patients”. He said it was condemnable that chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh had not taken any action against the health minister and was in fact shielding Balbir Sidhu. “The SAD will not keep quiet. We will ‘gherao’ the chief minister’s residence in Chandigarh on June 15 and demand Sidhu be dismissed besides calling for a CBI probe into both the vaccine and Fateh kit scams”.

Answering a query about lack of facilities in government hospitals, Mr Majithia said the government had failed to upgrade its hospitals despite claiming to have spent Rs 1100 crore on this in the last one year. “This is also a major scam. Nothing has been done to provide quality healthcare to the people ever since Covid hit the State one and a half years back. As many as 17 districts remain without ICUs. Ventilators received from the centre remained packed for months before being given to private institutions with the government failing in its duty to recruit the staff needed to run them. No effort was made to establish Covid Care centres at the block level. You have already witnessed how vaccines purchased by the State for Rs 400 were sold to private hospitals at Rs 1060 even as the latter were allowed to jack up the prices to Rs 1560 to Rs 2000. Similarly, the price of Fateh Kits which were originally tendered for Rs 837 per kit was jacked up to nearly Rs 1400 per kit by repeated re-tendering”, Mr Majithia asserted.