Many of the state-owned hospital compounds in the capital have become the ideal place where vendors operate makeshift stalls to sell a variety of mostly household products.
Illegal drug trade is also very common inside as well as outside hospital compounds where relatives of patients have been victims of mugging and theft on many occasions.
More often than not, rickshaw vans kept in rows on both sides of the entrance to Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital prevent ambulances from easily entering the facility. In such cases, emergency patients are the worst sufferers for whom every second counts until they are inside the operation theatre.
Products sold in the vans include clothes, bangles, hair ties and sandals, and vendors say they have to pay weekly to do business.
They refused to disclose who they pay for occupying the space, only saying that a portion of the money goes to hospital workers.
Sohel, who sells women’s clothes in Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital compound, said he usually sells to patients’ relatives and visitors. “I can do business for a day upon paying Tk200-500.”
A young girl who was choosing bangles to buy said yesterday the products look nice and she often buys different stuff sold in vans when she leaves the hospital after visiting a patient, who was admitted there two weeks ago.
There are also shops and shanties built around the hospitals illegally and local influential groups control those with the connivance of third and fourth grade workers of the healthcare centres.
But hospital officials refused to talk about how small traders and vendors had turned the compounds into business hotspots.
They said they had not noticed any such trade inside the compounds, adding that there might be vans outside the hospitals.
Police said stopping van trades is difficult as the punishment is lighter than the degree of offence of doing business this way.
RAB recently detained 16 middlemen from outside the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation in the capital’s Sher-e-Bangla Nagar and it was found that they operated with the help of four hospital workers.
The detainees were sentenced by the mobile court of RAB Executive Magistrate Md Al Amin but the hospital workers who functioned as accomplices were handed over to the hospital authority.