Karnataka health minister Dinesh Gundu Rao on Friday called the flagship Mohalla clinics in Delhi ‘not a game-changer’ after he visited the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government-run primary health centres in the national capital. He compared the initiative with those in the southern states and said Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka also have such models. “It (clinics) is not like the way it is made out to be.”
“The way it’s being projected, there are so many other states, including Karnataka, where we have a better system…we have namma clinics…and we are doing things in a much better manner,” the state health minister said as quoted by news agency PTI.
Earlier in the day, Gundu Rao arrived in the national capital and he was welcomed by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. With an aim to discuss how the AAP government is implementing their health policies in Delhi, the Karnataka minister said he visited mohalla clinics after hearing a lot about them.
He was accompanied by Delhi health minister Saurabh Bharadwaj and other officials. The Delhi minister appreciated Gundu Rao’s visit to the health facilities in order to ‘further improve the namma clinic of Karnataka’.
However, almost an hour after the visit, Gundu Rao wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he returned feeling ‘disappointed’. He claimed that there were hardly any people in the clinic and said clinics in Karnataka have more facilities.
“Visited a Mohalla Clinic in Delhi with hardly any people there. Our Clinics in Karnataka have more facilities including a laboratory to do immediate tests for patients. I guess it is overhyped and I came back feeling disappointed,” he wrote.
Responding to Gundu Rao’s remark, AAP MLA Naresh Balyan lashed out at him and critcised the namma clinic facility in a post shared on X.
“The namma clinic you were talking about, Crocin medicine is also not available in the clinic. Don’t know how many years it has been closed. The game you are playing at the behest of (Congress leader Ajay) Maken, in this game we defeated Maken 10 years ago,” he wrote.
Notably, both Congress and AAP are members of the recently-formed political alliance of Opposition parties, INDIA bloc.