Instead, these visits have left the victims’ relatives with increased feeling of pain. For, their visit did not give any respite from rampant corruption and negligence of the hospital authorities . Some of them even complained that they had to wait for long hours for the postmortem of deadbodies.
Relatives and friends of Pramod Chaurasia,42,on Thursday had to spend more than 10 hours to get an autopsy done on his body, that too after a brief dharana in front of the postmortem house at Lady Hardinge hospital, in central Delhi.
Chaurasia became a victim of the blast on Wednesday when he had gone to the Delhi High Court to appear in a case. He was a resident of Lone, a Delhi suburb.
“He was quite ok at the time of being hospitalised. He died in the morning and since then we have been trying to get his body. Initially, it was a problem of identification because his address was wrongly recorded. Any how, we overcame the problem. Now, when we reached the post-mortem house, the doctor went out for lunch. Now we have sat here in protest,” says Sufer Chauhan, a fellow victim and Chaurasia’s neighbour.
Chauhan narrates how they hired a private ambulance for Rs 1,800 to bring the dead body to Lady Hardinge.
“The private taxi service charged Rs 5,400 to bring three dead bodies to this place despite the fact that the distance from Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital to the Lady Hardinge Hospital is only three kilometer,” he alleges.
Sufer also alleges that he had to buy medicines for Rs 800 from chemists outside the hospital as he was advised to do so by RML hospital officials. He shows the receipt.
Other aggrieved relatives has similar stories to tell. One of the relatives of Inder Singh, 82, cried from the ambulance carrying Singh’s dead body that staff at the postmortem house were charging more for the polythene being used to wrap dead bodies. “They are charging Rs 800 for it which is available for Rs 300 in the market,” he shouted.
Relatives complained that there was none to help them in completing the arduous tasks, nor there is any facility available to them.
Vijay Kumar, the father of blast victim Vijay Kumar,26, has another complain to make. He pleads that VIPs should not visit hospitals as it hampers treatment of patients. “They come to show their sympathy, but, in fact, it harms the patients,” he says. Vinay Kumar has been camping in the hospital since Wednesday.
