The Supreme Court on Monday pulled up the Gujarat government after it formed a committee to scrutinise deaths due to coronavirus in the state for disbursing compensation, reported Live Law. The court said that formation of the committee was against the court-approved process for providing compensation to families of those who died due to Covid-19.
A bench of Justices MR Shah and BV Nagarathna was hearing a plea seeking to quash a resolution issued by Gujarat’s health and family welfare department on October 29 regarding formation of the committee, reported PTI.
On November 18, the bench had observed that the formation of the committee seemed to be “an attempt to overreach the directions” passed by the Supreme Court on disbursal of the compensation.
On October 4, the Supreme Court had said that state governments should not deny ex-gratia compensation to the families of those who died of the coronavirus merely if the death certificate does not mention the disease as the cause of the fatality. The court said that if a patient dies within 30 days of testing positive for coronavirus, the death should be considered to have been caused by the disease.
At Monday’s hearing, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Gujarat government, said that an amended notification on the formation of the committee has been issued but it needed some changes.
The bench asked Mehta who issued the first notification and said that it wanted to fix accountability. To this, Mehta said he was ready to take responsibility.
“Why should you take responsibility?” the court replied. “The concerned officer must. Who drafted this?”
The court then asked Additional Chief Secretary Manoj Aggarwal who had drafted the notification.
Aggarwal replied that the notification goes through several officials before the competent authority approves it. He added that the chief minister is the competent authority on the matter.
To this, Justice Shah replied: “Your chief minister does not know anything? Mr secretary, you are there for what? If this is your application of your mind, then you don’t know anything. Do you know English? Do you understand our order? This is just a bureaucratic attempt to delay.”
Mehta then intervened to point out that there were genuine concerns about people making fake claims of Covid-19 deaths.
“We never asked you to appoint a scrutiny committee,” Justice Shah said. “We cannot accept the amended one also. It will take one year for getting the certificate from the scrutiny committee? It says come with the hospital certificate. Which hospital is giving the certificate?”
He added: “Mr Mehta, what does he [Aggarwal] mean by saying that it goes to the chief minister? For what purpose is he there?”
Justice Nagarathna said that just just because people were making false claims, did not mean that genuine persons will have to wait to get compensation. “Death certificate is issued by the [health] department itself, how can it be forged?” she asked.
To this, the solicitor general said that while death certificates cannot be forged, false RT-PCR tests can be done. However, later Mehta said that the notification was recorded in an “idiotic” manner and a modified resolution will be passed.
The court directed the Gujarat government to disburse the compensation at least to families of those Covid-19 victims for whom details of death are available on the government portal. It also asked the Centre to collect information from states on the progress they have made regarding the disbursal of compensation and setting up of grievance redressal committees.
The matter will now be heard on November 29.
On October 4, the court had accepted the Centre’s submission that state governments will pay Rs 50,000 compensation to the families of Covid-19 victims. The court had said that the compensation should be “over and above the amounts paid by Centre and states under various benevolent schemes”.
The bench had also told the Centre and state governments to widely publicise the compensation scheme in print and electronic media.
Till Monday, 4,65,911 people have died due to the coronavirus disease in India.
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