New Delhi: As Delhi battles with the sturdy second wave of the Covid-19, myriad ambulance services are fleecing people who require their services to transport Covid-19 patients from their homes to the hospital.
The ambulance services in the National Capital Region are charging an exorbitant price to ferry patients from their homes, or from one hospital to the other.
The rate card of these ambulance services starts from anywhere between Rs 10,000 to Rs 60,000 to ferry patients for up to 10 kilometers.
The Sunday Guardian Bureau Chief, Abhinandan Mishra,who’s currently undergoing treatment in a private hospital in New Delhi for Covid-19, had to shell out Rs 27,000 to be transported from a hospital in Gurgaon to a private hospital in Delhi’s Paschim Vihar.
The distance between the hospital in Gurgaon to the private hospital in Paschim Vihar where Abhinandan is currently undergoing treatment is just 37 km, and the price charged to him works out to be Rs 770 per kilometer for a one-way ambulance service.
Not only Abhinandan, but many other people also have similar complaints of being fleeced by ambulance services flooded on social media.
Senior IPS officer, Arun Bothra had also recently put out a tweet saying that a patient was charged Rs 10,000 for carrying a Covid-19 patient for just 4 kilometres.
Krishna a resident of Delhi, has complaints regarding an ambulance service that charged him Rs 25,000 to carry his ailing relative from his home to the hospital which was at a distance of just 13 km.
While aresident of Noida, Meenakshi complained that she had to pay Rs 47,000 to shift her mother from her home in Noida to a private hospital in Delhi which is just 27 kms away.
Like Krishna, Meenakshi and Abhinandan, many others have voiced similar complaints about how ambulance services in New Delhi and NCR region are looting patients and their family members at their most vulnerable time.
And most of these ambulance services are refusing to hand out any bills for the exorbitant prices they are charging from the family members of Covid-19 patients.
Many also plead that the government must step in to regulate the prices of these ambulance services in New Delhi and National Capital Region.
The Sunday Guardian also spoke to some ambulance services in New Delhi and the National Capital Region and all these ambulance services quoted very exorbitant and unreasonable prices to carry a patient from one place to another.