MoS Health Choubey in eye of storm for inaugurating old Bihar ambulances with new posters

After BJP's Rajiv Pratap Rudy, another BJP MP and Union Minister of State for Health Ashwani Kumar Choubey has been accused of re-inaugurating old ambulances with new posters on them for the current COVID situation in Bihar.

It is being alleged that Ashwini Choubey has inaugurated the same ambulance which was given by SJVN to the Buxar Health Department during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. However, after winning the elections, he had reportedly directed authorities to hand over the ambulances to the company.

After facing outrage, the company could not take the ambulances out of Buxar for over a year and they were kept on the campus of Sardar Hospital. As per the allegations, the same ambulances were inaugurated with new posters by Choubey to combat the second wave of COVID-19 in Bihar.

After all these allegations, the controversy escalated on Saturday after a tweet by Bihar Health Minister Mangal Pandey. He tweeted and said, "In the presence of Union Minister of State for Health Ashwini Choubey and I, the Medical Doctor Aapar Door programme operated by SJVN and Dhanush Foundation launched five mobile medical units with a life support system for selected five seats of the Buxar parliamentary constituency through a virtual medium." along with the tweet, he attached a few pictures of the inaugurated ambulances which are said to be old. 

COVID In Bihar 

Bihar was on Sunday rattled by 89 more COVID-19 fatalities, though its active caseload and the number of cases reported in a day continued to decline, leading to further improvement in the rate of recovery and a drop in the positivity ratio. According to the health department, the death toll has now reached 3,832, an increase of more than 1,000 since the beginning of this month when the state went under a lockdown to contain the raging second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of fresh cases was 6,894, the first occasion in the past several weeks when the figure was less than 7,000. The total number of cases confirmed in the state since the beginning of the pandemic more than a year ago is 6.51 lakh.

The intensity of the recent outbreak can be gauged from the fact that more than half of the coronavirus infections in Bihar so far have been reported in the past one month. On the brighter side, 5.72 lakh people have recovered, and the number of active cases, which was a week ago more than one lakh, has come down to 75,089.