Chandigarh: The AAP government in Punjab has no development agenda because the coterie of Bureaucrats working around the CM are misleading him. These Bureaucrats are totally unprofessional, fawning and non performing.
This was stated by Sh. O P Soni, Senior congress leader and Former Deputy Chief Minister, during a press conference in Chandigarh today. Reacting on the few stories which are doing rounds in the media regarding the purchase of Sanitizer and Mukh Mantri sehat Bima Yojana, Soni said that he has already asked his lawyers to initiate the legal proceedings against all those who are responsible for the leakage of official documents to the media houses which is indeed a exercise to spoil my blotless political career.
He also dared the Chief Minister S Bhagwant Singh Mann to take action against all those officers of the health department who are just doing nothing for the last three months and just making brownie points before the political masters by making false and baseless allegations against the former ministers.
Soni, who remained MLA(five times), Deputy Chief Minister and Cabinet Minister, further said that there is no irregularity in the purchase of the sanitizers as being mentioned in the section of media. The sanitizer was bought by the health department at Rs 160/- as the rate contract of the above specification was done by the controller of stores, department of Industries. The specifications were approved by the technical committee of experts of the health department. As the epidemic disease act 2020 was in place we had to order on basis of urgency for the health workers and the doctors.
Even the specification requirement of sanitizers for doctors and health workers is different from the sanitizers required for general public during elections.While the purchase of sanitizers for the election department was held at my instance under open tender in which prices were less . it was done for the reasons one the specifications were different and two there was no emergency as the elections were more than month away. Still by my efforts I saved the government exchequer and the got the lowest rate of Rs 54/-. Moreover the total purchase of the sanitizer in my tenure for health workers and doctors was not beyond 2.5 Crore Approx during the third wave for whole of Punjab.
The stories are being carried out of proportion by mentioning 200 Crores or 500 Crores which is factually incorrect. To add this there has been departmental inquiries into these purchases in which nothing indiscriminate was found, one inquiry was done by the new government also.
Regarding the Ayushman Bharat-Mukhmantri Sehat Bima Yojana, he said after multiple rounds of discussions with SBI officials and IMA representatives, no positive steps were being taken by the insurance company to settle the claims of private hospitals and the private hospitals totally stopped taking new patients thus after receiving the formal approval from the CMO, on 24th December 2021 , the termination order were recorded on the file and SHA was instructed to issue show cause notice for black listing, recover the claims and losses and take appropriate action for maintaining the continuity of the scheme and take all the necessary steps as per law to comply with directions issued and to assure that the residents of Punjab should not suffer anymore.
Subsequently the health secretary also issued the notice for black listing show cause and necessary action on 27th December. Accordingly on 29th December the termination order was issued by CEO State Health agency. Now suddenly the then Finance Secretary, KAP Sinha started negotiating with the company directly and gave them many big allurements and incentives still the company didn’t show any interest to continue further. He literally hijacked the whole project and made the CEO SHA a puppet. Neither any action was taken against the company by the then finance secretary KAP Sinha not he allowed the CEO – SHA to implement my orders of taking stern action as clearly visible in my order .
Alleging gross negligence and mismanagement by the present health secretary, Punjab, Soni said that National health authority in his letter dated 15-06-2022 clearly appreciated the action taken to terminate SBI General and criticized the department that inspite of the state has been implementing the scheme in trust mode without any dependence on the insurance provider, yet there seems to have been no improvement in the scheme performance and the numbers of weekly admissions in Pvt hospitals has fallen from 9000 to 1000. Rather than wasting time in finding drawbacks in the performance of the earlier ministry, can the health secretary clarify what steps he has taken so far on these issues. Why the government has not settled the claims and paid to the private hospitals This officer is a non performing asset to the AAP govt.
Soni demands a through probe into this Sanitizer and Mukhmantri sehat bima yojana by central agency in time bound manner, this smells a scam by few officers who are making loss to the state excehequer to the tune of 100 of Crores.
