Bhopal: Amidst call for boycott of Chinese goods across the country, corona fighters in Madhya Pradesh wear PPE kits from China.
On the heels of recent stand-off between India and China, Chief Minister Shivaraj Singh Chouhan and most of the Bharatiya Janata Party workers have requested people to shun Chinese products.
Rehan Golden, the caretaker of Jehangirabad cremation ground, told Free Press he collected around 40 PPE kits for his staffs on Sunday from JP hospital as instructed by the Bhopal municipal Corporation.
Golden says Prime Minister began a campaign called Aatmanirbhar campaign where he promoted locally made goods and urged the citizens to avoid products from international market.
Despite that, all the kits were of inferior quality and made in China, he added.
A huge number of frontline health workers, sanity staffs and cremation staffs were seen wearing the PPE kits imported from China.
A doctor from AIIMS requesting anonymity alleges that most of the equipments provided to them form the hospitals are imported from China and not just the PPE kits.
The government is supplying the PPE kits to all the covid-19-centred hospitals in Bhopal including Jai Prakash Hospital, Hamidia Hospital and AIIMS. The kits imported from China have been manufactured in Zhenxing district of China.
The Principal Secretary of Health department, Faiz Ahmad Kidwai, says all the Chinese products cannot vanish from the market at once. If the government has some, they have to be utilized, he added.
It has been two months since the department of health has stopped buying the kits, he said. The state has more than 7.5 lakh kits in use at the moment and nobody from the department goes to count how many are Chinese, added Kidwai.
