They cleared the red tape to make the system work

NEW DELHI: Patient welfare committees in Madhya Pradesh’s public hospitals have made an impact by levying nominal user fees and seeking donations to improve conditions in medical colleges, district hospitals and community health centres.
The Planning Commission and the UN Development Programme have chosen this initiative, which originated in Indore and has spread to over 600 hospitals, as one of 20 successful experiments other states can learn from.
The committees are registered societies, which work like NGOs or independent group of trustees, and take functional decisions. They comprise officials, citizens, representatives of the Indian Medical Association, panchayat members and leading donors.
These Rogi Kalyan Samitis have used the money collected to repair and build facilities, purchase equipment and provide free or subsidised care to the poor.
They use surplus land to construct shops and lease them out or manage canteens, ambulance services, rest houses and other facilities within a hospital complex. The monthly collection, at a conservative estimate, is put at around Rs 2.5 crore to Rs 3 crore in all hospitals.
Among the successful initiatives listed across 14 states is Karnataka’s Bhoomi e-governance scheme which aims at accessing land records quickly. The idea is to make the entries at the taluka level through private agencies, get these validated by village accountants, and keep these updated, and mak printouts available at kiosks for a fee.
The database will be made available to banks, courts and lending institutions. Once the scheme has been operationalised in a taluka, manual records would be null and void. The scheme has reached 70 lakh farmers.
According to the report, the scheme plugs a major weakness but replicability, needs two injections — money from the Centre and state’s commitment.
Andhra Pradesh started Rythu Bazars in Andhra in 1999 to snap the middleman link from the farmer-to-consumer chain.