Peripheral hosps in the grip of a crippling drug shortage

In Mumbai, where millions depend on suburban hospitals, the BMC’s peripheral facilities are buckling under strain - outsourced services, staff shortages, drug scarcities, unsanitary practices, and non-functional new hospitals. This story is part of our series on the city’s failing public health infrastructure, and its human toll.

- Aditi Shekar

Outside the gates of Ghatkopar’s Rajawadi Hospital, one of Mumbai's biggest civic-run peripheral hospitals, private pharmacists hover just beyond the entrance. Waving used prescriptions as props, they solicit business, calling out to patients in a crude and humiliating spectacle. To edge out competitors, some announce discounts and hastily escort patients to their shops. The scene resembles a local bazaar.

With most of the BMC’s 16 peripheral hospitals in the grip of a crippling drugs shortage, patients have little choice but to surrender to private merchants like these, profiting from the desperation of the sick.

‘The shortage of drugs, medical equipment and devices, is not only a financial burden on patients who depend on civic hospitals, it has made the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) Zero-Prescription Policy announced in 2023 a nonstarter.

‘According to the much-hyped policy, the BMC had promised that all medicines would be available at hospital pharmacies - there would be no need to buy from private chemists.

‘And, yet, on Thursday, only one of two pharmacy counters were functioning at Rajawadi Hospital - that too, intermittently. By evening, both were shuttered, as they are every day. Aasma Ansari, 30, who came in three times this week with a persistent throat infection, was distraught.

“They give basic tablets but not the main medicines. Every time I come, they say stock isn’t available. I am entitled to get my medicines at the hospital pharmacy; instead I spend more than ₹300 on drugs that should be free.”