With budget of Rs 152 per bed at Gorakhpur’s BRD hospital, medical experts decry funds distribution

According to Dr Harsh Vardhan at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, patients bring medicines and surgical items from outside as hospitals don’t have the budget for them.

Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College, which tackles encephalitis and meningitis cases every year, has a budget of just Rs 5.32 crore for medicines, according to the state budget figures.

A woman with her child inside the encephalitis ward at the BRD medical centre in Gorakhpur on Tuesday. (Deepak Gupta/ HT Photo)

This medical college, which four lakh patients visit every year, has 955 beds out of which 150 have ventilators for emergency care.

The experts at the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS) say the budget per bed at the Gorakhpur medical college comes to just Rs 152.62 per bed per year.

Professor Devendra Gupta of the SGPGIMS ventilator unit says, “Expenditure of around Rs 5,000 to Rs 8,000 per day is incurred on a patient on ventilator support and around Rs 1,000 on an average bed. So, the government must think about increasing the medicine budget.”

Dr Harsh Vardhan of SGPGIMS says, “There is little wonder that patients have to bring many medicines and surgical items from outside as hospitals don’t have the budget for them.”

“Can you believe that the Kanpur GSVM medical college has a budget of just Rs 5.28 crore for medicine? This is a pathetic distribution of funds in a state with a population of 22 crore,” said Dr PK Gupta, president of Indian Medical Association (Lucknow).

Most of the time, experts say, the plea to increase the budgetary allocation for medicines falls on deaf ears. But it is incidents such as the Gorakhpur tragedy that bring the attention back to the state’s crumbling health infrastructure, the experts add.