Give top priority to safeguard people's lives: Shabbir Ali

Hyderabad: Former Minister Mohammed Ali Shabbir on Wednesday asked Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao to give top priority to saving the lives of common people, as there were reports of at least three patients dying due to lack of oxygen in Osmania General Hospital on July 27. Three similar deaths were also reported from Nizamabad where patients died due to non-supply of oxygen.

Shabbir Ali, in a media statement, said that the Chief Minister held a review meeting for the second time in a week to discuss the plan for the new Secretariat. He said that the Chief Minister did not show similar concern over the loss of hundreds of lives due to coronavirus in Telangana State.

"KCR govt has miserably failed to handle Covid-19 situation in the State. Instead of engaging in one-on-one combat with the disease by taking all precautionary measures and deploying entire resources, the CM always focused on finding an escape route," said the Congress leader.

"He first denied its existence and then called it as normal flu. He then tried to gain some mileage during lockdown by making some big announcements. In the end, the KCR government did nothing concrete either to trace and test the patients or to provide them better treatment. Instead, he forced officials to innovate means to suppress the statistics of cases and deaths. Now he is trying to hide his failures behind the corpses of hundreds of people who died due to Covid-19," he alleged.

Shabbir urged the Chief Minister to change his attitude and give priority to measures that could save the lives of common people. He said CM KCR could temporarily manage his image by hiding the statistics. But the people who lost their loved ones will carry the scar of wounds inflicted on their hearts due to the negligence of the State government forever, he said.