Punjab Govt dithers on paying Rs 58 lakh medical bill of Burundi youth Yannick

Gagan K Teja

Tribune News Service

Patiala, July 11

Over a year after comatose Yannick Nihangaza was airlifted from Patiala’s Columbia Asia Hospital to his home nation Burundi, where he breathed his last later, the Punjab government is yet to pay medical bills amounting to Rs58 lakh to the hospital.

Yannick (23), student of a private university near Jalandhar, had slipped into coma after being attacked by nine youths on April 22, 2012.

Nestor Ntibateganya, Yannick’s father, had written to Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on June 20, 2012, following which his son was shifted from a Jalandhar hospital to the private institute in Patiala.

The Badal government had then said it would bear the entire treatment cost of Yannick, who remained on life support (ventilator) for more than two years at Columbia hospital. The total bill was around Rs1.37 crore, of which a major portion was contributed by a US charity while a certain amount was waived off by the hospital. The government was to pay around Rs63 lakh, of which it has so far cleared only Rs5 lakh.

Though hospital officials refused to comment on the matter, sources said the issue had been unsuccessfully raised several times with the district administration. Once the bills were lost and the hospital had to resubmit the documents, which ran into hundreds of pages with detailed description of the treatment, sources said. Patiala SDM Gurpal Singh Chahal said the bills had been forwarded to the authorities concerned.