Bengal Constitutes Sixth Committee For Covid Pandemic, This One Headed By Doctor With ‘Dog Dialysis’ Taint
This is Coronavirus time, and what West Bengal needs from its Chief Minister is commitment, not committees. Sadly, she is offering the latter minus the former.
The Bengal government has constituted yet another committee — the sixth in a row — to oversee the state’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
And as has been the case with some of the earlier committees, this too has run into criticism.
The latest committee announced on Sunday is headed by Pradip Kumar Mitra, a former director of the state-run superspeciality Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research (IPGMER) who has now been pulled out of retirement.
Mitra courted a huge controversy in June 2015 when he reportedly agreed to allow a dog to be admitted to the state-run superspeciality Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research (IPGMER) for dialysis.
He was removed from the post and shunted off to a nondescript hospital.
The dog belonged to a close relative of senior Trinamool leader and West Bengal Medical Council president Dr Nirmal Majhi.
The bizarre request for performing dialysis on the pet dog (there are no dialysis facilities for animals in veterinary hospitals in Kolkata) reached Dr R.N. Pandey, the then head of IPGMER’s Nephrology department.
Dr Pandey forwarded the request to Mitra, who allegedly agreed to it.
It was after senior doctors of the department objected and put their foot down that the plan was aborted.
Last year, the Medical Council of India (MCI) censured and warned the trio of Mitra, Pandey and Majhi.
Mitra, who protested his removal and termed his transfer as a demotion, had threatened to resign.
He was made an Officer on Special Duty (OSD) to the state health department and then the Director of Medical Education (DME).
The new committee, named ‘Covid Management & Containment Committee’ headed by Mitra as the state coordinator, has been mandated with overseeing the functioning of testing laboratories, treatment facilities and protocols for Covid-19 positive patients and other related matters.
This committee is preceded by another one. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had announced the constitution of a ‘Cabinet Committee on Covid Management’ in the fag-end of last month.
That four-member committee is headed by finance minister Amit Mitra.
That committee, too, had been criticised since it does not have the health minister (Mamata Banerjee holds the health portfolio) in it.
Banerjee had then said that managing the pandemic was taking up too much of her time and “other important works” were “suffering”.
Hence, she delegated the critical task of managing the pandemic to this committee.
The move is widely seen as a ploy by the chief minister to shield herself from mounting criticism against the manner in which the pandemic is being handled in Bengal.
“Amit Mitra has been made a scapegoat and will be the fall guy when the situation gets out of hand, as it surely will,” said a senior bureaucrat.
Earlier this month, Mamata Banerjee formed a ‘Global Advisory Board For Covid Response Policy’ headed by economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee.
This body is supposed to help the state government frame an action plan to revive the state’s economy post-lockdown.
The only ‘advice’ that this global body has offered to the state government till now is to ensure that people visiting markets in Bengal be sanitised and that all people wear face masks.
Abhijit Banerjee offered this advice at a video conference with the chief minister earlier last month (read this).
That it took a recipient of the coveted Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences to offer this simple advice was met with ridicule and a lot of black humour.
Banerjee also reportedly urged the chief minister to do what all experts have been recommending for a long time: conduct more tests.
In the first week of April, Bengal formed three task forces to frame plans to manage the pandemic and “address economic issues arising during and post the coronavirus-induced lockdown period”.
The task forces were mandated to cover issues like “restoration and relaxation” (of lockdown), looking into economic aspects and “enforcement” of orders and suggestions.
The three task forces are headed by the state chief secretary, a senior bureaucrat from the Finance Department, and by the home secretary.
It is not known if these task forces are working and what work they have done till now.
On 26 March, the government constituted a 12-member ‘committee of experts’ headed by a controversial physician, Sukumar Mukherjee.
This committee is to advise the government on various technical issues required for fighting the pandemic.
Sukumar Mukherjee, a rheumatologist and internal medicine specialist, was indicted by the Supreme Court in what was inarguably India’s most-publicised medical negligence case.
The apex court had awarded a whopping Rs 5.96 crore to the widower of Anuradha Saha who died at a private hospital in Kolkata under Mukherjee’s care in May 1998.
The apex court, while censuring Mukherjee (and two other doctors), termed his conduct as “unbecoming of a doctor” and observed he had “brought great disrepute to the medical profession”.
Mukherjee’s licence was suspended by the Medical Council of India after the apex court verdict.
Mamata Banerjee had also made him a member of the West Bengal Clinical Establishment Regulatory Commission in 2017.
Ironically, this Commission was tasked with investigating cases of medical negligence by doctors and hospitals.
In late-March, the state government formed what is popularly called a ‘death audit committee’ that was tasked with auditing deaths of all Covid-19 infected patients.
The committee was empowered as the only one to certify if such a patient had died of the coronavirus or co-morbidities.
It was also mandated to recommend treatment protocols for Covid-infected patients.
This committee is headed by Abhijeet Choudhury, a gastroenterologist. “How can a gastroenterologist head such a committee? A virologist or epidemiologist should have been asked to head this committee,” said a senior epidemiologist serving at the state-run superspeciality SSKM Hospital in Kolkata.
Choudhury was reportedly provided a state helicopter to fly to different parts of the state, carry out inspections and counsel doctors.
Choudhury, son of a once-influential CPI(M) leader who was close to former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, is also the conveyor of the ‘global advisory board’.
Incidentally, the ‘death audit committee’ was virtually shelved earlier this month when the state government decided to follow ICMR guidelines on declaring deaths of Covid-19 infected patients.
The state’s action was triggered by questions about the role of the committee, which was widely accused of suppressing the actual Covid death toll, raised by the inter-ministerial central team (IMCT).
Little is known about the first committee set up by the Bengal government in mid-March — it was called the ‘Covid-19 Task Force’ — to deal with the pandemic.
It was, say state officials, given a quiet burial after the formation of the ‘death audit committee’.
In fact, it was a declaration by this task force on 2 April that the state’s death toll had risen to seven — the number was quickly downgraded to three by state chief secretary Rajiva Sinha — that the ‘death audit committee’ was formed (read this).
Opposition politicians say that chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s propensity to form committees arises out of “her desire to be seen to be doing something rather than doing some concrete work”.
Also, they say, Banerjee feels such committees will shield her from being blamed for the mess that she has created.
“But she does not know that the people of Bengal know that the buck stops at her and she alone is responsible for whatever has been done or not been done,” said BJP state president Dilip Ghosh.