A special ambulance, a gift from India to the Lalmonirhat Sadar Hospital, is still lying there – neglected – with no one to see.
While government hospitals are modern in keeping with the times, Lalmonirhat Sadar Hospital is different.
Despite the infrastructural development of Sadar Hospital, there has been no change in the mentality of the hospital officials and employees, many patients and relatives of the patients coming from different upazilas of the district and many patients from the neighboring district of Kurigram are commenting.
At present, if you climb the stairs in the four-storey building of Sadar Hospital, you will see the modern specialized ambulance on the left hand side. Looking at the ambulance, you can understand how many have been carelessly neglected for a long time. This is not an ordinary ambulance, it is a specialized ambulance with life support gifted to the people of Bangladesh by the people of the neighboring country India. It costs around Rs 1 crore.
It is known that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to Bangladesh on a two-day state visit on March 26 and 27, 2021. At that time, he announced the gift of 109 life support ambulances to Bangladesh to improve the quality of health services and jointly deal with the Corona situation of that time. Following the announcement, all the ambulances entered Bangladesh in 5 consignments announced by the Prime Minister of India.
Sanjeev Kumar Bhatti, appointed Assistant High Commissioner of India, handed over the symbolic key of the ambulance at a discussion meeting held at 4:30 pm on December 22, 2021 at the municipal premises to gift the state-of-the-art specialized ambulance to Lalmonirhat municipality on the golden jubilee of independence. Municipal Mayor Rezaul Karim Swapan presided over the event and the then Deputy Commissioner Abu Zafar, retired Captain Azizul Haque Bir Prateek, Additional Superintendent of Police (Circle) Marufa Jamal and others were present. Hundreds of freedom fighters were also present in that event.
Some employees of Sadar Hospital, who did not wish to be named, said that due to the ambulance being in an abandoned condition, the internal equipment was opened and sold by a class of unscrupulous employees.
When talking to the mayor of the city, Rezaul Karim Swapan, he said, “It is not desirable that the Sadar Hospital authorities should leave such an expensive ambulance in this way. It is unacceptable that patients coming to the hospital will be deprived of this ambulance service. So I will ask the hospital authorities to start ambulance service as soon as possible.
In this regard, the conscious community said, life support ambulance service should be started with proper dignity of this precious gift of neglected India.
In this regard, when the supervisor of Lalmonirhat Sadar Hospital, Dr. Md. Ramzan Ali, asked to see the inside of the ambulance, he expressed his inability and left his office without officially saying anything to the journalists.
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