The Rs 56-Crore Machines Nobody Was Trained to Run

When the Machine Works But the System Doesn't There is a

particular kind of public health failure that does not look like neglect at first glance. Money was spent. Machines were bought. Somewhere in a government file, a capital expenditure target was met. At the Delhi State Cancer Institute (DSCI), that is precisely the failure hiding in plain sight - and it is why patients like Sabra, a tailor from Jaffrabad who has spent over Rs 1.2 lakh out of pocket in two years, are still paying private centres for tests a government hospital owns the equipment to run for free.

The Gap Between Buying and Building A PET

Cyclotron purchased for Rs 15.42 crore in 2017 has been idle since 2018, not because it broke, but because DSCI never had enough trained nuclear-medicine staff to operate it. A Rs 9.2 crore linear accelerator has not functioned since 2020.

A dual-head gamma camera worth Rs 11 crore sits "under evaluation." Add a PET-CT scanner and a DNA/RNA extractor and the idle inventory crosses Rs 56 crore - while patients are routed across the road to private diagnostic centres charging Rs 8,000 to Rs 25,000 per scan.

Why This Is an Ethical Failure, Not Just an Administrative One

It would be easy to file this under bureaucratic delay. But the ethical failure runs deeper than a staffing shortfall. Every rupee spent on a machine that cannot be operated is a rupee that could have funded the technicians needed to operate it - a choice made, whether deliberately or through neglect, by someone with the authority to sequence capital spending against human-resource planning.

The Delhi Health Minister has blamed the previous government for the equipment and promised fresh recruitment, including 13 senior residents hired on 44-day contracts. But temporary postings that do not retain young oncologists do not fix a structural problem; they only delay its next appearance.

The Human Cost of an Institutional Choice For Sarita, a

62-year-old lymphoma patient, the PET-CT scan her doctors ordered is simply "not available" at DSCI - even though the hospital owns the machine. For Sunita Ghai's family, DSCI's non-functional linear accelerator meant an eight-item radiotherapy shortfall that sent them to a charitable private hospital instead.

These are not abstract statistics; they are the exact patients public cancer hospitals exist to serve, absorbing the cost of a planning gap they had no part in creating.

What Accountability Would Actually Look Like The Delhi High

Court's audit is a start, but audits document failure after it has already been lived by patients. A public hospital's capital procurement plan should be conditional on a parallel, funded staffing plan - with equipment purchase orders and recruitment sanctions tied to the same file, not sequenced years apart.

Until that link is made non-negotiable, DSCI's story will repeat itself: crores spent, machines gleaming and patients still walking across the road to pay for the same test twice.