Disgraceful Donations

NEPAL’S health institutions still lack a great deal of sophisticated equipment that are omnipresent in such institutions in the developed world. Many health institutions run by the government thus look for donations of such equipment from international agencies working in the field of improving health services in the developing world. Equipping hospitals and centres with a crucial diagnostic or a treatment machinery means a great difference to the service that these institutions provide. The news about this or that donor agency gifting this or that machinery to a health service organisation is a familiar one. But a news piece the other day that many of such machineries, often gifted amidst much fanfare, are useless equipment comes as a shocker. A high official at the Ministry of Health was quoted as saying that these outdated, out-of-order equipment were donated by international non-government agencies solely for the purpose of getting them out of the developed countries where getting rid of these obsolete machineries was a costly affair. It was more convenient to dump them on developing countries like Nepal, while in the bargain a lot of goodwill was also earned.

This is a pure scandal. It certainly does not seem like the case of looking gift horse in the mouth. The list of such obsolete equipment runs long. An X-ray processor, an auto-clap and a dialysis reagent donated to Sahid Gangalal National Heart Centre don’t work. MRI mammography machine at the Teaching Hospital in Maharajgunj is useless. So are city-scanning machine at the Koshi Zonal Hospital and an X-ray machine at Gandaki Zonal Hospital. ADRA Nepal, the agency that donated these equipment, is in the dock. It however claims that the machines were in good condition when they were donated, implying that they fell into useless conditions only later. It is true that Nepalese health institutions are generally notorious in maintenance aspects, be it a building or a machine. But the list of what concerned health authorities call useless equipment, donated to not one but several institutions, is just too long and specific not to wonder whether there is something fishy. Part of the blame for all this must lie with the Ministry of Health which has the job of granting permission to bring those machines into Nepal. Clearly, lack of vigilance at that point is partially responsible for this. But no less amount of blame should be shared by the recipients as well. Why weren’t the apparatuses tested by these beneficiaries before they were accepted with open arms? The first thing to do for the Ministry of Health now in this respect is to carry out an investigation into these disgraceful donations and come up with general set of safeguards to save Nepalese health institutions from being used as a dumping site for useless pieces of metals from the developed world

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