Three men, riding together on a scooter, arrive at the Osmania General Hospital (OGH)’s in-patient facility on a Tuesday afternoon. The one in the middle carefully gets off the two-wheeler and trudges inside, to an overcrowded, overworked out-patient department, supported on the shoulder of the pillion rider. The third man proceeds to locate a parking spot in a hospital so overcrowded he may have to park outside. The scene is reminiscent of a comical sequence from the 2009 Hindi film 3 Idiots, but is, in fact, a glimpse into the everyday experiences of people seeking medical care at Telangana’s top tertiary government hospital.
On the face of it, Hyderabad’s OGH is an institution, some of whose buildings date back to 1926, need help. Nearly a century on, the toilets are frequently flooded and often unusable, while patches of ceiling in almost all the buildings peel off and come crashing down. But when the Telangana government decided to demolish all the 29 buildings and bring up new ones with 1,812 beds, across the 24-acre campus, there was resistance.
Every day at the hospital kitchen makes food for approximately 900 patients. At the laundry, about 1,100 bedsheets are washed, ironed, and folded. It is this scale of operations that has stretched the limits of the hospital, originally built for 400 patients. Currently, each patient is accompanied by at least two attenders, adding further pressure to the system.
