A YEAR after the Nainital High Court had asked Uttarakhand health department officials to make the district hospital’s “blood bank and trauma centre functional” in accident-prone Bageshwar district, and with the order not implemented till date, the court on Tuesday warned that it may be “constrained” to stop salaries of top health officials for December if an affidavit is not filed in two weeks. In its order, the division bench of Justices Rajiv Sharma and Alok Singh said the state government must file an affidavit by December 11 mentioning the status of the blood bank and trauma centre. The High Court order of November 10 last year had come while hearing a PIL filed by a Bageshwar-based NGO, Nagrik Manch, in April 2016. D K Joshi, the counsel for Nagrik Manch, said, “The blood bank and trauma centre buildings were completed (constructed) in Bageshwar district hospital in 2011, but they are lying abandoned. We had filed a PIL to make the buildings functional so that the high number of accident cases can be tackled in the district itself.” According to collated data mentioned in the PIL, 88 accident cases came to the government hospital in Bageshwar in the two years between April 2013 and March 2015. But all these cases had to be referred to hospitals in other districts since the trauma centre does not function there. On Tuesday, the HC bench observed, “Since neither the blood bank nor the trauma centre is available at Bageshwar, patients are referred either to Almora (74 km from Bageshwar) or Haldwani (167 km from Bageshwar). It may prove fatal in case of (an) emergency.” The bench asked the state government to show “due sensitivity” in the matter. In case of dissatisfaction with the “status report”, the order stated, the court may be “constrained to pass the orders stopping the salary of the Secretary (Health), Government of Uttarakhand, as well as all gazetted officers serving in the Medical, Health and Family Welfare Department” for December this year.
