Owing to several fire outbreaks taking place in hospitals across Maharashtra, the state government has approved a fund of INR 200 crores for the work related to fire safety compliance in hospitals.
This development came after an audit was conducted in over 500 government hospitals as repeated incidents of fire outbreaks in hospitals across Maharashtra amid the pandemic occurred.
So far, the state has already released INR 19 crores for fire safety implementation.
Under the district planning and development committee (DPDC), 25 per cent of the funds have been reserved for the health sector.
If reports are to be believed, nearly 53 people lost their lives in fire outbreaks in the hospitals in Maharashtra amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. Most of them were coronavirus patients.
For those unversed, the incident started with a devastating fire at Bhandara District Hospital on January 9 that led to the death of ten infants. This was followed by multiple incidents in Mumbai. The worst incident was on last November 6 when a fire broke out at the ICU of Ahmednagar Civil Hospital, which claimed the lives of 14 patients. Preliminary investigation showed that most of the COVID care centres and hospitals lacked adequate fire-fighting equipment.
In April, in order to gauge the violations of fire safety rules, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had instructed all the districts to audit the hospitals. Now, as the audit has been concluded, the state is aimed at cementing the gaps in the next six months.
In the past three months, the state has audited a total of 511 tertiary-care and peripheral hospitals other than primary health centres for implementation of fire safety rules. The inspection was done under the PWD department.
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