Bihar health dept cancels contracts of 12 NGOs for poor works

The state government in Bihar has terminated the contracts awarded to 12 NGOs to run the rural health centres following large-scale complaints against them, health officials said today.

Health Department officials said these NGOs had been asked to provide health services at 42 additional private health centres in Bihar.

“The works of these NGOs were far from satisfactory and hence we decided to terminate the contract”, Bihar’s health society executive director Ravi Parmar said today.

Parmar said the government has now decided to run all the 1,243 additional primary health centres across the state on its own.

In 2006, the state government had floated tenders inviting bids from the interested parties to run health centres on public private partnership.

Of all, the government shortlisted 12 NGOs and authorised them to provide health facilities at 42 centres but their services were not found up to the mark.

Officials said the NGOs were collecting around Rs 9 lakh from each of the health centre in lieu of their services.