Togadia found unconscious
“Dr Togadia was brought in a semi-conscious state. His sugar level was very low” at the time. But he has been recovering quickly and is stable,” said Dr Rupkumar Agrawal of Chandramani private hospital.
Sources in police said he was found in Kotarpur Water Works area in the city, but details were not immediately available.
A Rajasthan police team had gone to the VHP’S office in Paldi to “execute a court warrant” against the 62-year-old Togadia, but they returned without him as they couldn’t find the VHP leader, said Maman Singh, superintendent of police in Sawai Madhopur.
Gujarat police too said that Togadia had not been detained, but VHP members blocked roads in Ahmedabad, Surat and Rajkot, demanding that Togadia be “released”.
Togadia is protected by a Z-category security but left his guard behind when he boarded an autorickshaw with a “bearded man”, police said.
“He told a guard that he will be back soon and left the VHP office with a bearded man in an auto…” said JK Bhatt, the joint commissioner of Gujarat police’s crime branch.
The warrant was issued by a sessions court in Gangapur under the Indian Penal Code’s Section 188, which pertains to disobedience of a public servant’s order. Togadia had allegedly violated prohibitory orders under Section 144 -- which limits the assembly of people -- in the Rajasthan town 16 years ago. ment of a 7-year-old Adya, who died of dengue in September last year.
The hospital has maintained that its pricing was “in-line with what other private hospitals in India charge.” It denied it had charged above the marked MRP or violated the drug price control order, both of which do not require that the profit made on NON-NLEM drugs be less than 50%.
The committee has asked Delhi government to ensure that the NLEM drugs are also available at pharmacies. “As profit margins on NLEM drugs are lower, pharmaceutical companies often do not push these medicines in the market,” said Dr Arun Gupta, president of the Delhi Medical Council, and one of the members of the committee.
“The committee found that drugs and investigations constitute 50-60% of a bill at the hospital, so these were the areas on which we focussed,” he added.
Among the recommendations is that the charges for diagnostic tests done within hospitals must not exceed their costs at stand alone labs by more than 10-15%.
“People visiting hospital outpatient departments have the option of getting investigations done from other labs, but patients who have been admitted have to get tested in the hospital. We have recommended that the cost of the tests should be comparable,” said Dr Gupta.
Apart from the drugs and investigations, the committee also examined fixed “packages” offered by hospitals for various surgeries and procedures. “Often, the bill exceeds the prices mentioned in the packages by a huge margin, so we have suggested that the prices should vary not more than 10%,” said Dr Gupta.
To keep the price within a fixed range, the committee suggested that hospitals offer “special” packages that costs slightly more than normal packages to cover the cost of potential complications. “It will work like insurance, not all the people who opt for the special package will have complications, so the ones who do can be treated with this fund,” he explained.
A corpus for patients coming to the emergency department so that they do not have to pay for anything more than the actuals of drugs and consumables used and colour-coding NLEM drugs to make it easier for customers to identify them are among the other recommendations of the panel. Ichak Dana from the old Raj Kapoor film Shree 420, many from the Israeli delegation said they knew the song, according to Vijay Gokhale, secretary economic relations in the ministry of external affairs (and the next foreign secretary). The band also played the famous Hebrew number Heveny Shalom Aleihem.
But the upbeat mood of the state visit was summed up best by Netanyahu himself at a gathering of business leaders in the evening.
“I came here to say thank you for believing in Israel, the way we believe in India. What we can do together is shape the future. I believe in India,” he said.