Sonia to launch Aarogya Sri Scheme in AP

Nellore (Andhra Pradesh), Jul 17: Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi will launch today the second phase of Rajiv Aarogya Sri Scheme, offering the cashless health scheme for 6.56 crore Below Poverty Line (BPL) population of 23 more districts in Andhra Pradesh.

The Aarogya Sri-I, initially intoduced in just three backward districts of the state, is now being extended to 10 more districts offering 389 surgical processes to treat 144 ailments, Mr A Babu, the Chief Executive Officer of the Aarogya Sri Programme told newspersons on the eve of its launch under Public, Private Partnership.

The serious diseases covered under the scheme include heart, cancer, neuro surgery, renel, burns and poly trauma cases, he informed.

The scheme would provide the entire amount for the network of 320 hospitals, including 35 government hospitals, for round the clock services to treat the identified patients through mobile hospital network. Every expense will be met by the state from the identification, transportation of the patients to the nearest hospital, treatment/surgery to post care treatment as prescribed by the specialists.

All the customer care executives can monitor every process right from the identification, admission, treatment and discharge online giving the best care for the BPL patients, having white ration cards containing photographs of the entire family. The hospitals will get the payment in one week from discharge of the patients. The doctors treating the patients too will have to own the responsibility for providing the best treatment.

Many of the doctors working in government hospitals had earned upto Rs 400,000 additional income a month and even the paramedical staff like nurses, ANMs and wardboys were earning double of their salaries in the last one year of the scheme, Mr Babu said. The government headed by the Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, a medical doctor by training, provided Rs 50 crore for the Aarogya Sri Scheme for first year and increased the budgetary support to Rs 450 crore as compared to Rs 4,000 crore for the total spending on the health care in the state, he said.

The process of identification of the beneficiaries, issual of bio-metric white ration cards for the entire beneficiary family had taken one-and-a-half year at the cost of Rs 195 crore. But, these cards and data base can be used for dispensing different social benefits to the beneficiaries, he informed.

The system devised internally had evinced interest from at least three of the developed countries -- the United States, UK and Sweden and 13 states of India, including Karnataka, Gujarat, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Kerala.

UNI