Tribune News Service
New Delhi, March 26

As India wages war against COVID-19, the country requires more isolation wards and to meet the requirement, the government has decided to turn a chain of 32 paramilitary forces hospitals across the country with a total capacity of about 1,900 beds into isolation and treatment facilities to treat affected patients.

Officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs said, these 32 hospitals are operated by forces like the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Border Security Force (BSF), Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) and are located at places like Greater Noida, Hyderabad, Guwahati, Jammu, Tekanpur (Gwalior), Dimapur, Imphal, Nagpur, Silchar, Bhopal, Avadi, Jodhpur, Kolkata, Pune and Bengaluru, among others.

The officials said an “urgent” decision to takeover these “composite hospitals” of the forces was taken at a high-level meeting at MHA that was chaired by the secretary of border management.

According to the decision, the officials said an order has been issued by the medical establishment of these forces, which said that these hospitals have been “designated and earmarked for the purpose of isolation cum treatment of COVID-19 patients as and when they arrive”.

In the order it has also been advised that arrangements should be made to shift people already admitted to another location in case more number of coronavirus-affected people are brought there.

The Central government earlier this month had also directed the CAPFs to prepare quarantine facilities with a bed capacity to admit over 5,400 people at their 37 locations in the country to deal with coronavirus cases.

Border guarding force ITBP is already running the largest such CAPF quarantine centre, which can accommodate 1,000 people in the national capital’s Chhawla area.