A Pune-based journalist with a private news channel succumbed to the coronavirus Wednesday after a private hospital in Ahmednagar allegedly delayed his treatment over advance payment. Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar has ordered a probe in the journalist’s death.
Pandurang Raikar, 42, was brought to Pune’s Jumbo Hospital at COEP from Ahmendgar on Tuesday evening. He passed away early Wednesday morning after his saturation level dipped drastically.
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Raikar, a journalist for 14 years, is survived by his wife and two kids. He was a reporter with TV9 channel in Pune.
His family and friends alleged that the hospital delayed admitting him unless he made an advance payment of Rs 40,000.
According to Kunal Jaykar, a close relative, the journalist had undergone a swab test in Pune two days after Ganesh installation on August 22. “The test was negative. He then decided to take rest and return to Ahmednagar, his home town,” he said.
But on Saturday and Sunday (August 29-30), he felt unwell. “On Monday, he went to a private hospital in Ahmednagar which asked him to get a COVID test done. The hospital said it cannot conduct the test as it had run out of kits,” Kunal said.
The journalist then rushed to a COVID Care Centre located a few kilometers away from Kopargaon city. “Here, they conducted a rapid antigen test which confirmed him to be COVID positive,” Kunal said.
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The journalist and his wife then went to the private hospital in Ahmednagar. “All this while, Pandurang was feeling uneasy and breathless and required urgent hospital admission. However, the hospital refused to admit him. They asked him to pay Rs 40,000 as advance fees. They told him that it will take a time to make the payment as other patients were in the queue,” Kunal said.
Kunal said it was only after the intervention of the district collector and the tehsildar, the journalist was admitted by the private hospital. “However, it took nearly two hours for admission. Even as his condition was deteriorating, he was not given any treatment or any medicine by the hospital,” he alleged, adding had he received timely treatment, Pandurang would have survived.
Kunal said Pandurang’s condition deteriorated even after he was admitted to the hospital. It was then his family decided to shift him to Pune on Tuesday afternoon. “He was brought to the Jumbo Hospital in Pune in a cardiac ambulance around 8.30 pm. He passed away this morning,” he said.
When contacted, Ahmednagar district collector Rahul Dwivedi said, “As soon as I got the information, I directed the hospital to immediately admit the patient. As for the allegations from the family regarding demand for advance payment, we are looking into it.”
Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades.
Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives.
Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees.
During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa.
Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died.
Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More
