Instead of taking the corona challenge head on, the Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has preferred to behave like an ostrich and withdraw from the scene. Nitish lacks a proper perspective about the disease is clearly evident that he has not tried to create sufficient care units or hospitals in the state. Even in Patna only the MNCH is the only authorised hospital to treat corona. The PMCH has been kept away from the ambit of the treatment. The lack of treatment facility is manifest in the peoples’ perception that a corona patients cannot expect to comeback once they are admitted to the hospitals. Private clinics and hospitals in Bihar have been of no help in fighting the novel coronavirus. In fact, the government has not released a proper framework in which the private sector could be roped in to fight the pandemic.

Health infrastructure has been in shambles and the 15 years of Nitish rule has failed to bring about any basic change. The district as well as the secondary and tertiary hospitals are in a wretched state and none of them can claim to handle a pandemic of this nature. The coronavirus pandemic has only exposed the absolute lack of imagination of the Bihar government and its chief minister. In the past accusations were levelled against the health department, but on each occasion the BJP came to the defence of their ministers.

The chief minister Nitish who is known for overriding the views and suggestions from his opponents and even from the civic conscious people has been primarily responsible for the death of hundreds of poor Bihar after being infected by the dreaded corona. Just after corona raised its ugly head well-meaning people had suggested to convert the government hospitals and even acquire the private hospitals for treating the patients/But he refused to listen to them. Even while corona was ravaging the state, private hospitals were running in their own way.

The callous attitude of the government and its ministers could be gauged from this simple fact. A week back, his protégé and crawler, the deputy chief minister Sushil Modi had put the blame for large scale deaths on Lalu Prasad saying that this situation might not have cropped up if Prasad during his 15 year rule had put in place hospitals to meet the health challenges.

Modi like the elder Modi, who survives on Nehru bashing, has been known to survive on Lalu bashing. Baring the small period of nearly 1 year, Sushil has been the deputy CM under Nitish for last 15 years. Nitish and Modi had come to the power on the promise to transform Bihar. The people of the state had rejected Lalu. Modi has been in charge of the finance ministry since the day he joined the cabinet. Obviously he owes an explanation to the people of Bihar what he has done to augment and stream line the functioning of the health department. Incidentally his senior BJP colleagues have been the health ministers during these fifteen years. Modi cannot deny that the functioning of the hospitals has completely broken down in Bihar under the stewardship of the BJP ministers.

A couple of months back a young executive Ajit Kumar who was operated for some abdominal ailment died within hours of surgery at the premier hospital PMCH due to the want of ventilator. Ashwini Choubey who presided over the decline of the health services in Bihar, is now the union state health minister.

Bihar is in a mess. This not the accusation levelled by any political leader, instead it is the expression of feeling of a common Bihari. Corona will make a tremendous spike was a known fact. It was also known that Nitish and his ilk would shift their failures on the poor migrant labourers who had fled to the state. To say that the corona spike has been sudden is purely the part of the design to exonerate Nitish and his henchmen.

Like his elder brother Narendra Modi, probably Nitish too also believed that Corona will vanish within 21 days which was why he did not initiate steps to install health mechanism in proper perspective in the state. It lost the precious time to prepare for the pandemic. The government officials have been blaming the migrants of adding to the state's woes. Will Nitish or for that matter his BJP friends reply where those ill-fated labourers would have gone instead of coming to their houses. Why Nitish adopt preventive measures when he was aware of the gravity of the situation.

Nitsih was so scared of the disease that he set up a small health unit at his official residence which is constantly manned by the doctors and nurses. But the hospitals are unable to furnish this service to the common people. Bihar is the only state in the country where a meagre 15 per cent of the middle class people reside in the urban areas. Even the urban areas are mainly dominated by the poor and daily wage labourers.

While Delhi having less than a quarter of Bihar's population conducts 4,500 tests for 1 lakh people, Bihar does only 300. The quarantine centres are mired into complaints of corruption, mismanagement and loot. These are worse than hell. This is the reason that people do not like to stay in these centres. Incidentally, Bihar became the first state to shut down quarantine centres for returning migrants in mid-June. It had closed registration of migrants for quarantine earlier that month.

The corona pandemic also exposed the fact that state lacks enough health professionals. Bihar has one of the lowest doctor-patient and bed-population ratios in the country. But no serious effort was made by Nitish and his ministers to improve the situation. Some 5,000 approved posts for doctors in medical college-hospitals in Bihar are lying vacant

What is really disgraceful is even while Bihar is suffering, its people are dying, the BJP leadership is hell bent on holding the assembly elections in November. Preparations are being made in right earnest. The most shocking feature has been a group of youth owing allegiance to RSS and BJP has written to the Election Commission to declare the Nitish Kumar winner for another five years on the basis of his past performance.

The government failure to meet the challenge of the crisis resulted in fight between the health minister, Mangal Pandey of BJP and the health secretary. The official Uday Singh Kumawat is the second principal secretary to be removed from the health department in the last two months. While the minister was hiding behind the façade of the inability of the health secretary the number of positive cases reached around 43000 on Monday, the 11 new fatalities took the number of deaths to 232.

Incidentally on Friday, the Patna High Court directed Bihar government to furnish details of steps it has taken to deal with Covid-19 pandemic getting worse in the state. It also sought to know about number of isolation centres, facilities for patients, figures relating to availability of doctors and paramedical staff in the hospitals and also the number of ventilators and oxygen cylinders. What is worse is there is complete confusion over disposal of bodies; there are reports of them left lying for two days. (IPA Service)