The West Bengal Pollution Control Board (PCB) deadline for the treatment of bio-medical waste expired one-and-a-half months ago, but nearly one-third of city’s hospitals and nursing homes are yet to comply.

“Most of the units that are yet to comply are small. We have been repeatedly telling them to fall in line. If they don’t do so quickly, we have to take stern action,” said the board’s member-secretary Shyamal Sarkar.

In all, 100 city-based units are yet to comply with the order, including 79 privately-run clinics.

According to PCB figures, there are 337 large and small healthcare units within the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) area.

The ‘yet-to-comply’ list includes big units like Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Gun and Shell Factory Hospital, Assembly of God Church Hospital, Arabinda Seva Kendra, Kothari Medical Centre, Islamia Hospital, BR Singh Hospital and South Eastern Railway Hospital — all CMC-run facilities — and all the three jail hospitals and Student’s Health Home.

Following a Supreme Court directive, the state PCB had ordered that all city-based hospitals and nursing homes would have to either treat their bio-medical waste individually or join the newly-built private common bio-medical waste treatment facility at Howrah, latest by April.

The CMC had stopped lifting bio-medical waste from city healthcare units accordingly.

The state government hospitals, too, joined the facility soon after the deadline expired. However, everybody did not want to abide by the PCB’s directive.

“While most of the non-compliant government units said they had initiated the process, it is merely an eyewash. On the other hand, the private hospitals and nursing homes are simply trying to defer the directive as far as possible, ” admitted state PCB sources.

Debasis De, secretary of the West Bengal Nursing Homes Association, the organisation contesting the PCB directive, feels the principle of charging even for unoccupied beds is “unjustified”.

S.K. Chaudhuri, representative of Medicare Incin Pvt Limited, said: “The practice of charging on the overall bed strength is common everywhere and here, too, the agreement on charges — among the lowest in the country — was reached after a lengthy dialogue.”

“The units raising such a hue and cry over charging for unoccupied beds paid the civic body until April 1 on the same principle,” admitted CMC sources.