Chitvel (Andhra Pradesh): In a shocking incident, private ambulance drivers from the RUIA Government General Hospital in Tirupati demanded Rs 10,000 to carry the dead body of a child to his hometown 90 kilometres away. The father refused to pay the huge fare and arranged for an ambulance from somewhere else. But the drivers abused the driver of the alternate ambulance and sent him away. Left with no options, the father had to carry his son's body on a two-wheeler.
Leader of Opposition N Chandrababu Naidu took to Twitter to express his condolence and criticize the government medical authorities here. "My heart aches for innocent little Jesava, who died at Tirupati’s RUIA hospital. His father pleaded with authorities to arrange an ambulance which never came. With mortuary vans lying in utter neglect, pvt ambulance providers asked a fortune to take the child home for final rites," his tweet read, with a video of the child being carried on a two-wheeler.
The deceased child was the son of a Mango orchard labourer in the Chitvel village of Annamayya district. He succumbed to kidney and liver failure while receiving treatment at a hospital Monday night at around 11 pm. The family of the dead child asked the RUIA General Hospital ambulance drivers to move the boy's body from Tirupathi to Chitvel, about 90 km away. The drivers said it would cost Rs 10,000. The father, who could not bear the amount, informed his relatives in his hometown and they sent a free ambulance to Tirupati.
However, the RUIA ambulance drivers knocked off the drivers from Chitvel and insisted that the body be taken in the RUIA ambulance. The father, already shaken by his son's death, resorted to a two-wheeler to take his son's corpse home in time. Locals say such incidents have happened in the past and continue to happen as neither the authorities nor the police have taken any action to curb the "anarchy" of ambulance drivers.
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