An acute shortage of wheelchairs has hit patient-care service in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Bhubaneswar.

While security officials put the total number of wheelchairs at 60, the administration maintains that there are around 100. However, many of them are broken.

The condition is so bad that a patient needs to wait for an hour to get a wheelchair. “Around 5,000 to 6,000 patients turn up every day for their health check-up and many of them come in a serious condition. But the number of wheelchairs is quite insufficient to deal with the patient load. People come here as they have faith in us. But the administration needs to address the issue,” a senior faculty of AIIMS said.

“I along with my younger sister Madhumita took our 79-year-old mother, who is suffering from gangrene and whose three fingers have already been amputated, to get her checked by a specialist at the plastics surgery department. But I had to wait for nearly 45 minutes to get a wheelchair,” said Mitanjali Pradhan, who works in a private company.

She said: “When I finally got a wheelchair, it was broken. One of the wheels of the chair was completely damaged. My sister and I sought the help of others to take our mother to the plastic surgery department, then to the radiology department and to the surgery department on that broken wheelchair.”

Mitanjali’s sister Madhumita said: “Just imagine how painful it must be to carry our ailing mother on a broken chair. I sustained minor injuries,” Madhumita said.

Medical superintendent of AIIMS, Dr Dillip Kumar Parida, told The Telegraph: “We can’t buy more wheelchairs because we don’t know where to keep them. There is a shortage of space. People use wheelchairs and return them in a broken condition.”