“If I win, my first step would be to revive the PG hospital and giving it a facelift in the first year of my term,” says Firhad Hakim, the Trinamool Congress councillor who is now in the fray for Alipore Assembly seat, vacated by Tapas Paul who was elected MP in May 2009.

Asked why he is pushing a single-point agenda, the councillor of Ward 82 and chairman of borough IX of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation has a ready reply. “This is the only state-run-hospital in the area where thousands of people come every day from across the state, especially from rural areas. To them, a hospital in Kolkata means PG hospital in the central city and Calcutta Medical College and Hospital in north Kolkata.”

Hakim is outraged when he says the hospital is now in the grip of touts dealing in blood and medicines and is infested with rats, moles and cockroaches eating up organs and limbs of the dead. “I wish to drag Health Minister Surjakanta Mishra to the hospital and show him its condition,” says Hakim, a commerce graduate from the South City College.

Hakim shot into limelight in his area (Chetla in south Kolkata) after he exposed the alleged nexus between the CPM activists and local criminals. After Dom Pradip, a notorious criminal in the area, was lynched by slum-dwellers, Hakim rallied them around and forced the police into opening a closed file on the man to bring to light his criminal antecedents.

Today, he is banking on the support of around 60,000 slum-dwellers who form a major chunk of the 1.22 lakh-strong electorate in the Assembly constituency.

... contd.