As many as 22 condemned ambulances and official vehicles are parked on the premises of the District Health and Family Welfare office here for the last eight months as no one has come forward to bid for them in the public auction conducted by the authorities.
Even the five successful bidders, who bought five vehicles for ₹3 lakh, too did not turn up to take possession of the vehicles.
All these vehicles were manufactured between 1998 and 2003 and used for seven years after running more than 2.5 lakh km before being considered as scrap.
Those vehicles, other than ambulances, were used for the National Rural Health Mission and Janani Suraksha Yojane campaigning programmes in rural areas. According to the procedure, the District Health and Family Welfare officer wrote to the Deputy Commissioner, who was also the chairman of the Auction Committee, who in turn wrote to the Regional Transport Officer to examine and evaluate the vehicles. After conduction a thorough inspection, the RTO fixed the price for each vehicle that ranged between ₹40,000 and ₹1.9 lakh. However, the bidders took little interest to get near to the price fixed by RTO for each vehicle. Their maximum bids did not cross even the halfway mark of the reserved price fixed by the authorities. The non-disposal of scrap vehicles is now adversely affecting the performance of the department as it could not send a proposal for buying new vehicles before the scraped ones are disposed of in the auction. Only 33 ambulances are plying in the district as against the requirement of 65.
In order to address the issue, Ujjwalkumar Ghosh, Deputy Commissioner, has asked the RTO to re-evaluate the vehicles and fix lesser reserved price so that the scrapped vehicles can be disposed of.
The Health Department officials are now hopeful that the process would soon be over paving way for purchasing new vehicles.
