An 80-year-old woman suspected to have suffered brain haemorrhage had to be carried around on a plastic sack in the district hospital in Bihar’s Bhojpur on Friday as no stretcher was allegedly available.

Videos widely shared on social media show the frail woman, identified as Phuljharo Kunwar, lying on the sack on a dusty road and then being carried by three men, who held the ends of the sack, into the emergency ward of the Sadar Hospital at Ara in Bhojpur. Her weight caused the sack to bulge downwards.

Another man filming the episode on a cellphone points out that this is the condition of heath care at Bhojpur, whose minister-in-charge is the state’s health minister, the BJP’s Mangal Pandey.

Kunwar’s relatives said she had to be lugged around from one department to another inside the hospital too for tests and doctors’ advice as no stretcher was available.

The Opposition tore into Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar over his claims of improvement in health infrastructure.

Kunwar had fallen unconscious in the bathroom of her home in Bihta village on Friday. She was rushed to a government referral hospital at Tarari, where doctors suspected that she had suffered brain haemorrhage and referred her to the Sadar Hospital in the district headquarters.

Kunwar’s family members could not get an ambulance at the referral hospital and had to hire a vehicle to reach the district hospital.

Once there, they were shocked to find that no stretchers were available to take the patient around for tests and treatment.

“At first, two of us ran around in different directions in the hospital for a stretcher, but there was none. We asked some hospital employees, but they either did not even bother to answer or told us to wait,” Munna Kumar, Kunwar’s grandson, said.

“We did wait for a few minutes, but realised we were losing precision time. We looked around and saw a torn plastic sack. We made our grandmother lie on it and carried her around to doctors, for a CT scan and then back to the emergency ward where she was later admitted. There were just the three of us and we had a hard time carrying her around,” Munna added.

He said this was not the rosy picture of health care that politicians often painted.

Asked about the incident, hospital manager Kaushal Kishore Dubey said: “The family members of Phuljharo Kunwar had brought her to the emergency here. They asked the medical staff for a stretcher and were told to wait a bit. But they did not wait and carried the patient themselves. There is no dearth of stretchers here.”

Prodded further, Dubey said the district hospital had two stretchers, both of which were in use when Kunwar was brought in.

Sources said the stretchers were in a pitiable state and were seldom used to carry patients.

The mobile phones of the Bhojpur civil surgeon and the Ara Sadar Hospital medical officer in-charge remained switched off on Saturday.

Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav shared a photograph of the woman being carried on the plastic sheet and said: “This is chief minister Nitish Kumar’s BJP-type of development during 16 years of (his) rule.”

Health minister Pandey’s tenure has been pockmarked with allegations of inefficiency.

There have been waterlogging inside buildings, wards and operation theatres, complaints of misbehaviour by hospital staff and doctors with patients and their kin, absence of doctors from duty, lack of ambulances and hearses due to which people have been forced to carry patients and bodies themselves, bungling in tests, especially those pertaining to Covid-19, dearth of investigative facilities at government hospitals and poor nursing.

There are around 12,000 government hospitals and health centres in Bihar — 36 district hospitals, 67 referral hospitals, 54 sub-divisional hospitals, 533 public health centres, 9,949 sub-centres and 1,393 additional public health centres.

On Saturday, Nitish chaired a review meeting of the health department against the backdrop of a fast-spreading viral fever and cases of dengue and swine flu that have only added to the Covid woes.

Health minister Pandey and senior officers of the department were present.