Mumbai, Feb 11 (PTI) The Shiv Sena-ruled civic body has failed to ensure basic health care in Mumbai in the last 30 years, an Aam Aadmi Party leader said on Friday.

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Mumbai AAP working president Ruben Mascarenhas said Shiv Sena's proposal to set up polyclinics in the country's financial capital were similar to the ones already being operated by the Arvind Kejriwal government in Delhi.

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“AAP can provide technical expertise through the Delhi government. BMC commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal has claimed the proposed polyclinics of BMC would be better than those of the Delhi government's mohalla clinics. It is like comparing apples with oranges,” Mascarenhas said.

“The BMC has 187 public dispensaries, which are supposed to function as primary health centres. A vast majority of them are dysfunctional due to poor infrastructure and flawed operations. The BMC has not been able to fix something as basic as primary health care in the last 30 odd years,” he added.

The bed capacity in BMC-run hospitals has remained stagnant, despite a steep rise in population, forcing people to go to peripheral and tertiary hospitals, which leads to their capacity being overwhelmed and the quality of service deteriorating, the APP leader said.

Delhi has a three tier public health system, comprising primary healthcare or 'mohalla clinics', polyclinics or secondary health care and tertiary hospitals, and it has universal free and quality health care for all its citizens, Mascarenhas asserted.

"A mohalla clinic is at an average distance of one kilometer from the community that it was built to serve, and diagnostic tests are free, patient records are digitized, doctors are remunerated handsomely. Should it take more than 30 days for a government facility to undertake a prescribed operation, the same can be availed free of cost in a private facility," he claimed.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)