Red Cross slips forced on clients?

For the past few months, people have been complaining that they have been made to get slips worth Rs 50 for any legal work at these offices. “We just ignored it. But now this is the height of fleecing that one of the taxi drivers who had gone to a office for depositing the tax was asked to purchase Red Cross slips amounting to Rs 200 first, despite the fact that the said taxi driver revealed about his poor financial condition to the dealing clerk”, alleged some members of the local Taxi Union.

Condemning it they said, “The concerned clerk did not even bother that the poor taxi driver had just Rs 7 left in his pocket after paying off additional Rs 200 in the name of Red Cross, and he had to go back to his home located in Dehra”. It is also worth mentioning that it is not a lone case of harassment under the Red Cross head. Including this person, many others have on record complained to the Kangra district authorities about the fleecing tactics. The DC Kangra, the Red Cross president, was not available for comments.

Kangra District Youth Congress president Sandeep Ohri who has taken up the matter with the officers several times in the past especially the complaints pertaining to the office dealing with land mutation, said that the youth body would take up the issue with the Himachal Chief Minister soon. “If proper action is not taken to stop the malpractice, the Youth Congress would resort to agitation at the district headquarters in Dharamsala”, Sandeep Ohri said.

Meanwhile the Youth Congress has also decided to submit a memorandum to the state government seeking an inquiry into the alleged malpractices on the part of Red Cross Society whereby the medicines were not being made available to the poor patients and were being channelised to particular dispensaries on the outskirts of town through some “favoured doctors” to help them build the image in public by distributing free medicines in that particular area without any emergency of doing so.

As the DC was not available for comments, one of the senior executive members of the society here clarified that there were no instructions to force the Red Cross lottery tickets on clients coming to different offices. “We sell the slips through offices so that regular money comes in for the help of patients,” he said.