MARGAO: The Public Undertaking Committee of the Goa Legislative Assembly led by Opposition Leader Digambar Kamat and members MLAs Clafacio Dias and Wilfred D’Sa on Saturday inspected the work of the South Goa District Hospital. The Opposition leader has reminded that another deadline has been breached for the opening the services at the new facility as the Hospicio and GMC face troubles due to overcrowding of patients. 

In an earlier meeting of the Public Undertaking Committee, it was decided that by September 30, the GSIDC would handover the premises to Directorate of Health Services and supposed to give one month to Hospicio for shifting everything. 

The tentative date for opening services was fixed on November 1. However, the deadline has been breached. The Opposition Leader who heads the PUC said, “Today, we are on November 9. We had a meeting of the public undertaking committee last week, where we decided that we should go and visit and review what is the position, because it has not been handed over yet. Today we had a meeting with the GSIDC officials, Secretary Legislature and also had Superintendent of Hospicio and staff of Health services. I will not say there is no progress, there is progress, but they are still lagging behind; we are not able to commission it on the first of November as promised.”

“There are some operation theatres among the total 11 and we have asked them to make at least some of the OTs operational so that they can prepare for shifting simultaneously,” Kamat said. 

“The contractors said that they want payments for their works. Hence, we will discuss the same with the Health Minister and resolve it,” he said. 

Explaining the plight of the people in Hospicio and GMC, he said that people are actually crying because there is a collapse situation at GMC. “I have told the Health Minister last week when I went to GMC that Hospicio is a replica of GMC. There is too much load on the GMC, so unless this Hospital is commissioned this problem will keep worsening,” Kamat said. 

Kamat also reminded that the observation of the comptroller auditor general is report is that there is too much delay which is caused lots of inconvenience to the people of south Goa.