By IANS,
Kolkata : The people’s anger over the AMRI hospital fire tragedy which so far has claimed over 91 lives continued to rise with protestors Sunday putting up posters in the premises demanding exemplary punishment for its officials.
Local residents also demanded that a playground “snatched forcibly” for a park maintained by the medical facility adjacent to the Advanced Medicare & Research Institute (AMRI)hospital be returned.
“The hospital, using police force, snatched the land. We want back this land which was a playground for us,” read some posters put up by some residents of Panchanantala in South Kolkata’s Dhakuria where the hospital is located.
“The land on which they have now constructed a park belonged to the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority. It was forcibly acquired by the hospital. We demand the land be given back to us as we earlier used it as a playground,” said Sambhu Das, who lives close to the hospital.
Another poster showed area residents holding several trophies they won playing on the said field and accusing the authorities of acquiring it “forcibly in 2006”.
An AMRI spokesman, however, said the land belonged to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. “We don’t own the land. We have just beautified it and we maintain it round the year. So if they want back the land they should talk to the civic body.”
Several political parties, including the Socialist Unity Centre of India-Communist (SUCI-C), pasted posters on the hospital walls demanding exemplary punishment for the wrongdoers along with scrapping the private-public partnership (PPP) model hospitals.
“In the wake of this gruesome tragedy we demand the immediate scrapping of the PPP model hospitals so that such mishaps do not recur,” read a poster by the SUCI-C.
In the worst fire tragedy in any hospital in India, 91 patients and staffers were killed when a blaze started in the basement of the annexe building early Friday and quickly spread, trapping hundreds of people.
While most nurses, doctors and other staffers were able to get away, many critically ill patients died in their hospital beds.