- On Tuesday 4th May, MP from South Bangalore constituency Tejasvi Surya entered the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) South zone COVID war room during work hours declared that 16 of its workers were involved in a bed-for-bribe scam.
Surya’s press conference, a two-minute clip has went viral, the video also streamed live on Tejasvi Surya’s YouTube account, he is heard reading out names of 16 people, with Muslim names, while questioning the official in charge, “Who appointed these people?” Similar claims are being made by BJP MLAs Satish Reddy, Ravi Subramanya, and Uday Garudachar as well, as seen in the video.
Yet again on Thursday, Tejasvi Surya went to BBMP to apologize the Staff for his behavior. Fact checks over the claims that these 16 members of the war room were involved in a bed allocation scam led to a deadend, as only one of these 16 was part of the team of bed allocation and he had joined it temporarily just last week to replace another employee who had a personal emergency at home. The other 15 most of them young graduates in their early twenties were members of other teams involved in indexing, home isolation supervision and discharge of patients who finished quarantine period.
“My employees called me to say that Surya had visited the war room. He apparently told them ‘I have nothing personal against any of you. If anyone or any community is hurt emotionally by my visit, I apologise for that. I wanted to probe the bed allocation scam which had come to my notice, but if my actions had hurt anyone, please accept my apologies,’ he told the staff,” said Shivu Naik, project manager of the Crystal Infosystems and Services
Naik further added that, these 16 were part of a 212-member team deployed at BBMP for various tasks and there was no reason why they were targeted.
Naik told News 18, “We have kept them away from the war room tasks now, because of the allegations, but I have told them that the minute the police enquiry clears you, we will reinstate you either here or in any of the other projects we send staff for. But even otherwise, all our staff were anguished and scared, after such a sudden visit and the issue turning political. Many of them have stayed away from work, it was in fact affecting all Covid-coordination the last two days. We have tried to reassure them that enquiries happen, those who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. But perhaps it was because work was suffering that Surya came again, we are not sure what prompted the second visit.”
Surya had alleged at a press conference two days ago that there was a bed allocation scam fake blocking and unblocking of hospital beds allotted of 4,065 beds in the last 10 days. It showed a nexus of BBMP officials and private hospital agents.
While the cops has taken up this investigation now and conducted raids at all war rooms of all eight zones in BBMP to verify data, so far four persons have been arrested.
Naik told, The south zone staff was apparently worried that since some were taken for prolonged police interrogation, the 16 members named were labelled as ‘terrorists’ in many social media posts; they thought they could be detained too for any reason. IAS officers of the BBMP came in to reassure them that they had nothing to fear that BBMP must respond to those families suffering from Covid, and “filled them with confidence.”
