Kathmandu, May 25
Forests and Environment Minister Prem Bahadur Ale has gone viral on social media once again with pictures of blue oxygen cylinders where he has stuck his own picture.
The stickers on the cylinders read “medical tools received with the personal support of Honourable Prem Bahadur Ale”. However, most of the social media users have suspected that Minister Ale stuck his pictures on the cylinders that the government received as aid from China claiming he bought them, apparently to woo his constituency.
But, Ale says he distributed 125 cylinders at hospitals of Doti and Kailali and only 15 of them were the government property he received from the Department of Health Services.
“I spent money from my own pocket to purchase 110 cylinders,” Ale tells Onlinekhabar. “I gave 75 cylinders to the hospitals in Doti and 50 to the Seti Provincial Hospital in Dhangadhi. I have also given 250,000 masks and four oxygen concentrators.”
Ale says he is unaffected by the criticism. “The state doesn’t have (these tools) now. It has ordered but hasn’t been delivered. But, my people are in pain every day and night. They are dying. Why can’t I serve them?”
Earlier, CPN-UML leader Ganga Chaudhary has been found ‘seizing’ some oxygen cylinders the government received as an aid to distribute in her some district.
