Fan Ordeal – SMS Hospital orders mass repair

Sanket Upadhyay
These days at the Sawai Man Singh Hospital, its not only the ceiling fans but also the inspection squads of electricians and repairmen who are doing the rounds. After ceiling fans started taking the fall, the authorities at the state’s premier hospital fanned out tenders for mass repairs and inspection squads to prevent more from falling!
Last Wednesday, an old ceiling fan (they weigh as much as 30 kgs) fell down in the Medical Jurist Department – almost squashing under it the head of Doctor Nand Lal Disania. Fanning bonhomie, another fan called it in the State Secretariat building on Friday. The 50-year-old fan’s fall injured one.
“We constituted four squads, each comprising of an electrician, engineer and fireman, to take rounds in all the 48 wards of the hospital and other units like the Emergency, OPD and cottage wards to check for trouble-giving fans. Attendants in the respective wards were asked to identify problematic fans so that they could immediately be repaired,” SMS Hospital Medical Superintendent PPS Mathur told the Hindustan Times.
Though there is no fan census at the hospital, Hospital authorities have also given out contracts to private parties to undertake repair work of hundreds of fans following outside the SMS Hospital premises – the hostels and other quarters. That there hasn’t been any sincere effort to check these fans regularly in the past can be proved by the fact that private contractors pulled down many fans for the first time in 50-60 years – the first time since they were incepted.
“They are being opened, overhauled and repaired for the first time. Their look dictates that they are archaic, weigh around 20-30 kgs – probably installed during the Maharaja’s time – and being taken out for the first time. It is virtually impossible to find spare parts of many of these fans. The ones that have conked out would have to be dismantled and replaced with new ones,” a private contractor Babu Lal Sharma said.
Is it only when fans come chopping down on someone’s head when officials swing into action? “Incidents like these are rare. Electricians do take up individual complaints but this time, we have made a mission out of it,” Mathur asserted.