Vadodara, October 1, 2026 — For three months, the biggest government hospital in central Gujarat has been short of medicines that keep people alive, and the city’s political class has behaved as if the crisis does not exist.
Sir Sayajirao General Hospital treats thousands of patients a day. Its own resident medical officer, Dr Hitendra Chauhan, has now said on record what patients have been living with: stocks of diabetes and blood-pressure drugs are badly short, and the shortage has run continuously for the last three months. Of about 1,000 medicines the hospital needs, roughly 350 are unavailable or in short supply. Against daily demand, the direct gap is 25 to 30 per cent.
That is not a clerical hiccup. It is a collapse of supply at a hospital that consumes more than ₹30 crore of medicines a year. The agency meant to keep the shelves full, the Gujarat Medical Services Corporation Limited, has not delivered on time. The hospital has been forced into local tenders. Doctors have had to send patients outside to buy what a government hospital is supposed to give them. Poor patients are being told they will get whatever is left in stock. Everyone else is being pushed into the open market, at prices they cannot afford. Dissatisfaction in the city is already widespread. Outrage should be louder.
And where are Vadodara’s leaders?
The hospital administration has not hidden this. It has been sending detailed monthly reports on short supply to higher levels of government. Three reports. Three months. Same failure. A superintendent has admitted the shortage in public. A newspaper has put it on the record. If corporators, MLAs and the local political establishment still do not know, that ignorance is itself an indictment. A city does not get to claim it was not told when the largest hospital in the region has been filing the warning every month.
Knowing and doing nothing is worse. Diabetes and blood pressure are not exotic diseases. They are the daily load of a government hospital. A missed dose is not an inconvenience. It is a stroke, a kidney, a heart, a coma. Patients who came for free treatment are being handed a prescription and a bill. That is the state walking away from its own counter.
No response has come from GMSCL. None has come from the political leadership that is supposed to notice when a flagship hospital cannot treat the two most common chronic diseases in its queue. The reports went up. The medicines did not come down. For three months the city was governed as if the shortage were someone else’s problem.
It is not. It is a failure of supply, and a failure of the people elected to see it.
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