Horror hospital's sweetheart deal with Left Front government revealed

In the aftermath of the devastating AMRI hospital fire in Kolkata more skeletons are tumbling out of the closet. A page 1 story in The Telegraph today points out to the cozy relationship between AMRI and the state government under CPM patriarch Jyoti Basu. That itself is not news. Basu spent his last days in an AMRI hospital and its director SK Todi (now in custody) refused to accept any money for his treatment. He had known Basu since the 1960s, before the Communists had even come to power. [caption id=“attachment_155745” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“People gather near the AMRI Hospital where a major fire broke out, in Kolkata on Friday. PTI”] [/caption] But what’s news is just how close the relationship was and the sweetheart deal it garnered AMRI. Jyoti Basu’s government locked the annual lease rent for the land AMRI is on at Rs 9.94 lakhs, that’s at least 16 times less than the current market rate reports Pranesh Sarkar for The Telegraph. Even in 1998 when the deal was struck it was quite a bargain for AMRI, at least 10 lakhs below market value. Even more surprising, the lease was locked for 30 years, rather than the usual five years. During the great fight over Singur, when Basu’s successor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was assiduously wooing the Tatas, the agreement had a clause to review the lease after five years. Todi never had the kind of  warm relationship with Bhattacharjee as he had had with Basu. Now that the Left Front is out of power, officials are speaking out. “Such concessional lease rents are allowed only under political compulsions,” one official in the land and land reforms department told The Telegraph. The government not only lost out on rent. It also allowed its 26 percent stake in the project to whittle down to 1.9 percent. No one is saying there is any direct connection between the sweetheart deal and the negligence and mismanagement exposed by the fire last week. But it’s leading to intense speculation as to whether the government’s regulatory bodies dare to move against corporate groups with such cozy ties with the powers that be. The fire department found AMRI failing in various aspects of its emergency preparedness and yet it issued it an NOC earlier this year anyway. Mamata Banerjee’s great advantage is that she can be the new broom that sweeps clean and even score political points in the process.  She does not have to defend her predecessors. The government just barred Nightingale Diagnostic and Medical Centre from admitting patients after it was found it had not renewed its fire safety certificate. The police also arrested two other senior officials at AMRI – Satyabrata Upadhyay, a vice president who heads its safety committee and Sanjib Pal, the assistant general manager in charge of maintenance. Pal had signed the affidavit promising to clear out the basement where the fire broke out. But the bigger question is how many other such sweetheart deals exist, outside public knowledge and will they all need something as terrible as this fire to bring them to light? Read the rest of the report on Basu govt’s AMRI sweet deal here .