In an inhuman incident, a home guard, who sustained injuries while on duty, was refused treatment for over three hours at the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation-run Vadilal Sarabhai hospital here as neither he nor his colleagues could pay Rs. 500 towards CT scan.
The incident occurred on Sunday morning when the home guards were deputed on the route of the Lord Jagannath Rath Yatra as part of a full dress rehearsal for the event scheduled to take place on Tuesday.
The jawan, Zaved Sayed, was standing under a dilapidated house on the Yatra route when some cement slabs fell on him.
His home guard colleagues then rushed the unconscious Zaved to the V. S. hospital but the hospital authorities refused to start treatment till a CT scan was performed on him.
The hospital asked the accompanying jawans to deposit Rs. 500 towards the scan expenses, but they did not have the required money.
The home guards requested the hospital authorities to start the treatment and they look for arranging the money, but the hospital authorities refused to trust them even though the personnel were in their official uniform.
Rare incident
It took nearly three hours before they informed the police control room about the accident and the divisional commander of the home guards rushed to the hospital to pay the amount from his pocket before the injured jawan was given the treatment. It was one of the rare incidents when the security personnel, often blamed for inhuman treatment to the citizens, found themselves at the receiving end. The hospital authorities, however, refused to make any comment on the incident.
Full dress rehearsal
Meanwhile, the police performed a full dress rehearsal to review the security arrangements for Tuesday's Yatra, an event that had often sparked communal clashes in Ahmedabad or other parts of Gujarat in the past.
The police followed the same route the Yatra would take on Tuesday through the minority-dominated sensitive areas such as Jamalpur, Kalupur, Dariapur, Shahpur, and Mirzapur in the walled city areas.
The security arrangements for the 133rd Rath Yatra this year had been further intensified because of some intelligence inputs that attempts could be made to disrupt the festival.
For the first time, close-circuit television cameras had been installed all around the Jagannath temple in Jamalpur locality.
An official spokesman said over 3,000 policemen would be deployed in and around the temple.
Around 14,000 policemen will be deployed along the entire Yatra route. Like in the previous years, continuous videography of the entire Rath Yatra would also be carried out at several sensitive points en-route. Besides watch towers will be raised to keep a constant vigil on any suspicious movement.
Strict checking of vehicles at the entrance to the city as well as at all the check-posts on Gujarat's borders with Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra had also been initiated to prevent carrying of arms, bombs or liquor bottles.
Similar tight security arrangements were also being made in other cities in the State where Rath Yatra was taken out every year, particularly in Bhavnagar, another very sensitive city, which was celebrating the silver jubilee of the Yatra this year.
