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Patients forced to pay double
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20. He spent Tk 5,000 to hire an ambulance.
After a few days, when he went to hire an ambulance from DMCH to return to Noakhali, members of a syndicate there asked for Tk 6,000.
As Belal wanted to hire an ambulance from Noakhali, the members told him that “ambulances from outside” could only drop off patients. They cannot pick up patients from there.
Over phone, Belal then spoke to an ambulance driver who came to Dhaka from Noakhali with a patient. Its driver asked for Tk 3,000, which is half of what the syndicate at the DMCH asked, but gave Belal the condition that they would have to get into the vehicle outside the Dhaka University campus.
Asked, the driver said the syndicate members would not allow him to take any patient from the DMCH without paying them their cut.
“If you want to hire any ambulance near the hospital area, you will need their nod. They will keep half the fare as commission and thus I will have to charge you double the actual fare,” Belal quoted him as saying.
“We came to Dhaka borrowing money from my relatives. If there were no syndicates, we would have had more money for treatment.”
THE SYNDICATE
There are two ambulance owners’ associations -- Bangladesh Ambulance Owners’ Welfare Association and Dhaka Metropolitan Ambulance Owners’ Cooperative Association.
Dhaka Metropolitan Ambulance Owners’ Cooperative Association, the largest one, has about 2,700 members.
Both keep all ambulances across the country in their grip and their syndicates in the districts also do not let ambulances of other districts take patients away.
They have a set of unwritten rules regarding who can take which patients and it is mandatory for every hospital unit of the associations to follow.
For instance, if an ambulance from Dhaka takes a patient from the DMCH to Rajshahi, that ambulance has to return empty or pay the syndicate there half the fare for the vehicle’s return journey.
When asked about syndicates ripping off patients, Badal Matbar, general secretary of Bangladesh Ambulance Owners’ Welfare Association, tried to justify the syndicate’s activities.
“Members of our organisation have to pay Tk 1,500 monthly parking fees and membership fees of Tk 200 a month. It takes Tk 20-22 lakh to buy an ambulance. If ambulances outside the DMCH are hired, the owners will lose money.”
Asked about the syndicate, Alamgir Hossain, president of Dhaka Metropolitan Ambulance Owners’ Cooperative Association, said this was done to protect ambulance owners from incurring losses.
The syndicate members at the DMCH reasoned that if they allowed “outside ambulances” to pick patients from DMCH, the number of ambulances available there would shrink.
Wishing anonymity, an ambulance owner of Kushtia told this paper, “As soon as patients are taken inside Dhaka Medical College Hospital from ambulances, we are driven out of the hospital premises by the syndicate members there.”
While visiting the capital’s two other major public healthcare facilities, this correspondent found syndicates controlling ambulances there.
At Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital, ambulance driver Mizan said except the members of their organisation, Bangladesh Ambulance Owners’ Welfare Association, no one can take patients from this hospital. If others want to carry patients from there, they have to negotiate with them.
Al Amin, president of Dhaka Metropolitan Ambulance Owners’ Cooperative Association’s National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases unit, said, “Outside ambulances are not permitted to take patients from here because we cannot do it from other places.”
This correspondent in the three locations found most of the ambulances of the syndicates to be bare-bones. They had a gurney and an oxygen cylinder and hardly any other equipment.
NO GOVT POLICY
Alamgir Hossain, president of Dhaka Metropolitan Ambulance Owners’ Cooperative Association, told The Daily Star, “How will an ambulance run? How much will the fare be? No government policy has been made in this regard.”
Talking to this correspondent, DMCH Director Brig Gen Nazmul Haque admitted that an ambulance syndicate is active here. “Whenever I asked the syndicate members to leave the place, they go away but return again.”
The DMCH authorities have introduced a mobile app so that patients can get ambulances easily, but people are less interested in using it, he added.
The government has cut the import duty on ambulances. The import duty is about 31 percent for the run-off-the-mill ambulances people import. The same vehicle in the microbus configuration has an import duty of about 90 percent.

Mexico regains
FROM PAGE 12
to the underworld and “on its mouth is projected a sequence of three concentric bands, representing the cruciform access to a cavern,” it added.
Although it is not known how and when it was illegally taken from Chalcatzingo, “it is documented that it was made public in 1968, by the archaeologist David Grove in the magazine American Antiquity. From there it is thought that at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century it was already in the United States,” the statement said.
New York authorities recovered the monument, but the press release did not specify where it was found.
As part of the Mexican government’s effort to rescue historical heritage taken from the country, almost 10,000 goods have been recovered since 2018, authorities said.