Mumbai: When nine-year-old Rishabh Chandanshile, who suffers from respiratory illness, started gasping for breath late in the night in September this year, his aunt Vandana Taide rushed him to Shatabdi Hospital in Govandi, only to be referred to Sion Hospital.
“At Shatabdi Hospital, they told us that they couldn’t treat my nephew because there were no intensive care unit (ICU) beds, oxygen, or doctor,” Taide, 40, told Hindustan Times. “They referred us to Sion Hospital, where we were told the same thing.”
Eventually, Taide was forced to admit the nine-year-old boy to a private hospital as his condition was deteriorating and nearly five hours had passed while trying to find an ICU bed in a government hospital.
While Chandanshile is much better now, Taide had to pay a hefty deposit to ensure the private hospital admitted him and gave him the necessary treatment.
“We waited for five hours for a bed. If a public hospital can’t treat an emergency, why keep it open? Poor people can’t keep running to private ones,” she said.
Taide’s experience mirrors the grim reality across the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s peripheral hospitals, where ICUs are either non-functional or operate without qualified doctors.
Desperate to plug the gap, the civic body floated a tender in mid-2025, seeking intensivists to manage 153 ICU beds across 12 peripheral hospitals in the city. Among the positions the BMC is looking to fill are anaesthesiologists, physicians and post-graduates in general medicine trained in handling critical care patients.
The deadline for tender was extended several times, most recently in October, although no bids have been received, BMC sources said. Intensivists were being hired on contract despite complaints about the BMC’s earlier efforts at outsourcing critical care services, the sources said. Healthcare activists and civil society groups, meanwhile, alleged the corporation was normalising temporary fixes instead of hiring permanent critical care specialists.
Crippling shortage
According to sources in the BMC, ICUs in smaller hospitals are either non-functional or partially operational. This is reflected clearly in multiple cases of hospitals refusing admission to patients despite critical emergencies.
For instance, at VN Desai Hospital in Santacruz, a 28-year-old pregnant woman suffering from breathlessness was referred to Nair Hospital, several kilometres away, as she needed intensive care.
“They told me to go to a higher centre for my check-up. I was breathless for almost two months,” the woman said. “No medicines available, neither were doctors available to see me.”
A doctor at VN Desai Hospital confirmed that it did not have any trained doctors who regularly handled ICU patients.
A staff member at VN Desai Hospital confirmed that oftentimes there aren’t enough trained doctors to handle ICU patients.
“When a pregnant woman is breathless, it’s not normal. She needs immediate attention,” the doctor said, explaining why the woman was referred to Nair Hospital.
Along similar lines, the MW Desai Hospital referred a 23-year-old suspected dengue patient to another centre due to lack of ICU beds and qualified staff, even though the patient had high fever and was vomiting. An 85-year-old man with similar symptoms was also turned away in September for the same reason.
“When there are difficult cases in MW Desai or VN Desai (hospitals), patients are referred to the Jogeshwari trauma care hospital,” a doctor with a BMC-run run hospital told HT. “From Bhagwati Hospital in Borivali, they are referred to Shatabdi Hospital in Kandivali while the Bhabha hospitals in Bandra and Kurla usually refer patients to Cooper Hospital.”
When HT visited Rajawadi Hospital last Thursday, several patients who had been referred there by other hospitals in Govandi were seen waiting outside the premises.
“We just keep getting sent from one hospital to another,” a patient’s relative rued.
Problems with outsourcing
The BMC has been hiring critical care specialists on contract through agencies for nearly a decade now to close the yawning gap between the number of vacant posts and available doctors, sources in the civic body said. But the agencies often deploy underqualified staff, including ayurvedic doctors or general practitioners, in ICUs under false registrations, the sources added.
“Whenever ICU services are privatised or given to contractors, we see ayurvedic or homeopathic doctors being deputed in the ICU, even though they do not have any training in ICU management,” a doctor from a BMC-run hospital said.
The civic body has, in the past, taken punitive action against several agencies for hiring unqualified doctors. This has made the agencies wary of taking up fresh contracts, so much so that no bids have been received for the tender floated last month, according to BMC health officials.
However, healthcare activists and civil society groups allege the civic body is normalising temporary fixes instead of hiring permanent critical care specialists.
“Once you privatise such essential services, accountability disappears,” said Shubham Kothari from the Aspatal Bachao Neejikaran Hatao Kruti Samiti (Save Hospitals Halt Privatisation Action Committee). “ICU management requires trained anesthesiologists, intensivists, and MD physicians, not rotating contract staff.”
Unwilling staff
Senior civic health officials told HT that until intensivists are hired contractually, existing staff and doctors at the hospitals would manage ICUs. But though the BMC routinely assigns ICU duties to DNB residents, they often do not report for work or skip shifts, sources in several BMC-run hospitals told HT.
“They just punch in for attendance, then leave. If asked to handle ICU duty, they threaten to resign. So the hospital too does not push them,” said a staff member at a BMC-run hospital, requesting not to be identified. The DNB residents don’t want to take up continuous ICU duty because there’s no proper supervision, the administrator said.
HT reached out to deputy municipal commissioner Sharad Ughade, seeking clarifications about the fresh move to hire intensivists on contract basis. But the official did not respond to calls or texts.