The Hindu Business Line : SAHI gets further boost

Help from Govt: The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Dr Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, and the Karnataka’s Tourism Minister, Mr G. Janardhan Reddy, at the fourth anniversary celebration of Society to Aid the Hearing Impaired (SAHI) held at Apollo Health City in Hyderabad on Friday.

Our Bureau

Hyderabad, Nov. 14 Ms Nishita, 11, is not a great singer. But when she sang a few lines from ‘Mukunda Mukunda’ (Dasavatharam), a gathering of about 500 people at Apollo Hospitals’ open-air auditorium broke into rapturous applause.

Her mother, Jyotirmayi, first found that her daughter could not hear when she was just eight months old. This automatically had an impact on her talking abilities. She remained challenged both in hearing and speech for nine years till the time when they heard about the remedy in the form of cochlear implantation. After undergoing the Rs 10.5-lakh procedure, she is now able to talk and sing too.

She was among the 100 kids that gathered at the fourth anniversary of SAHI (Society to Aid the Hearing Impaired) held on Friday. Equipped with the new-found faculty of hearing and talking, they were all seen enjoying the music and speeches.

Dr Prathap C. Reddy, Chairman of Apollo Hospitals group, said SAHI contributed up to Rs 2 lakh for each kid to get the costly implantation done. “This has received further boost, when the State Government included this health condition into the list of diseases.”

Arogyasri help

Addressing the gathering, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, Chief Minister, said the Government spent Rs 1,000 crore on institutionalising the universal health insurance scheme. “We have significantly increased the help from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund since we took over. We used to give up to 50 per cent of the medical costs. But people were finding it difficult to raise the remaining amount,” he said.

Realising this, the Government had started the insurance scheme. “We are covering 940 different diseases and procedures.

corporate hospitals

Referring to the criticism that the scheme was to benefit the corporate hospitals, he said it was actually hurting these hospitals. “About 25 per cent of the 30,000 corporate hospital beds were reserved to the Arogyasri patients. They are, in fact, making losses in attending these cases,” he pointed out.

The scheme was benefiting the public sector hospitals, too. “We are paying the medical college-hospitals for treating the Arogyasri patients. Of this income, 35 per cent is going to the staff, while the remaining is going to the corpus for upgrading the facilities,” he said.

Hearing aids

Stating that the cochlear implantation was useful for children under six, he said for those who couldn’t be attended to, the Government was planning to give analog devices (Rs 10,000 each) free of cost.

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