Vadodara Sitting on a Medical Time Bomb
In the heart of Gujarat's most cultured city, a silent disaster is waiting to explode. Hundreds of gleaming multi-speciality hospitals, nursing homes and ICU centres line the streets of Sayajigunj, Alkapuri, Akota, Gotri, Atladara and New VIP Road. To the common man, they look like symbols of modern healthcare. In reality, most of them are illegal concrete jungles running on fake papers and political protection.
These are not roadside quack clinics. Many are 50- to 300-bed facilities with ventilators, modular operation theatres, cath labs and dialysis units, yet almost every one of them openly violates:
- Gujarat Nursing Home Registration Act
- Biomedical Waste Management Rules
- Mandatory Fire NOC
- Building Use permission from Vadodara Municipal Corporation
- Clinical Establishments Act
- In several cases, even basic registration of doctors with the Gujarat Medical Council
How do they survive? Simple. They start as a small 500 sq ft "clinic" on paper, then illegally add floor after floor until they become towering 30,000–50,000 sq ft hospitals without ever updating their registration. Agricultural and residential plots are magically converted into "hospital zones" overnight with forged documents. Fire NOCs are issued without a single sprinkler or fire escape because the file reaches the officer with a phone call from an MLA's PA.
Biomedical waste (used syringes, infected bandages, expired medicines) is routinely dumped in open grounds or handed over to unlicensed ragpickers, but the Gujarat Pollution Control Board never raids these "high-connection" facilities.
The COVID-19 pandemic turned this illegality into a goldmine. Hundreds of these unauthorised structures were declared "Dedicated COVID Hospitals" within hours by the state government. Crores were earned through inflated bills and phantom admissions, and the temporary permission quietly regularised buildings that should have been razed to the ground.
The protectors are the usual suspects:
- Sitting and former MLAs and MPs (from both BJP and Congress) who either own these hospitals or hold benami stakes
- Senior police officers who receive free treatment for entire families
- VMC officials who run a well-oiled weekly hafta system
- Gujarat Medical Council that almost never cancels licences even after proven negligence deaths
Every few years the mask slips. A fire kills patients trapped in an illegal top floor. A botched surgery makes headlines. A child dies because the "ICU" had no functional ventilator. Newspapers scream for 48 hours, the district collector orders a "survey", two or three small fries are sealed for optics, and within a month the jungle is back, bigger and bolder.
On paper, everything is legal because the paper itself is bought and managed. In reality, Vadodara has one of the highest concentrations of illegal medical establishments in the country.
The city is sitting on a medical time bomb whose timer is controlled by politicians, builders and greedy doctors. One major fire, one deadly infection outbreak or structural collapse is all it will take for the truth to come crashing down, literally.
Until that nexus is broken, the glittering hospital boards will keep promising "world-class care" while gambling with thousands of innocent lives, one illegal floor at a time.
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