The Kolkata Municipal Corporation has been forced to stop some services in its health centres because the Centre has stopped providing funds, Atin Ghosh, the deputy mayor of Calcutta who heads the civic body’s health department, said on Tuesday.

Ghosh said services like outreach camps and providing nutritious food to children getting vaccinated have stopped since last April when the funds dried up and fresh funds did not arrive.

KMC sources said a bulk of services provided by the primary health centres of the civic body are funded by the National Health Mission, which has contributions of the state as well as the central government.

The Centre’s share is not coming for the last two years and things are being managed with only the state funds, said a senior official of the state health department.

“We have not received any National Health Mission fund for the state for the last two years,” the official said.

In the KMC’s budget session on Tuesday, Ghosh said: “We are only able to buy medicines and give salaries to our doctors and honorary health workers with the funds we are getting.”

“The Centre has asked us to paint the health centres in a particular colour scheme, but we can’t give a fresh coat of paint in all the health centres that were already painted a few years ago. The Centre and the state are discussing the matter. We will get the funds when this (dispute) is solved,” Ghosh said in the session.

“The central funds are not coming. We used to give some food to children getting vaccinated in our health centres to encourage the parents to complete the vaccination cycle, but we were forced to stop that since April,” Ghosh later told The Telegraph.

This newspaper called the office of Union health secretary Punya Salila Srivastava and was directed to talk to a joint secretary in the department, who was not in office when The Telegraph called there on Tuesday evening.

A senior official of the National Health Mission was in a meeting when this newspaper called the official. The next call, after an hour, went unanswered.

“We had to stop organising outreach camps also. The camps were held in areas far from the health centres. A doctor used to be present in these outreach camps that were held once a week by all primary health centres,” Ghosh told this newspaper.

Sources in the state health department also confirmed that owing to the difference
in the colour of the health centres in Bengal and that
proposed by the centre under the National Health Mission, the funds have been
held up.

In November 2023, chief minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting his intervention so that the funds were released.

Mamata’s letter said that the “Union ministry of health and family welfare has withheld fund release under National Health Mission to West Bengal due to non-compliance of certain colour branding guidelines for Health and Wellness Centres, despite other conditionalities being fulfilled”.