It is more than a year since I was escorted out of SevenHills by the security staff for an innocuous e-mail requesting the consultants to meet the CMD in a group & try and convince him about the futility of having the satellite clinics. I do not think the letter was so inappropriate that I should be dismissed. I was neither paid my dues as per the contract nor was I given an opportunity to explain my stand. Legally, SevenHills was grossly wrong in its action but I did not want to take up the case legally because of the time & money involved. Dr. Harminder Singh was also treated in a similar, arrogant way. Now, one year down the line, we have the benefit of seeing things in retrospect. I think my stand has been vindicated because the clinics have closed & more than 25 consultant doctors have left after that. It is open to question if the hospital's stand in several things would have been for the better if we had been a little more united. Dr. Lalit Kapoor, medico-legal expert of the AMC, had voiced similar concerns regarding corporate hospitals & consultant doctors & how these things should be dealt with. But people continue being ostrich-like & refuse to confront reality until they themselves are affected. If at least 25 senior consultants left after I was forced to leave, at least 30 had left prior to that. No organisation I know has seen such an exodus of senior doctors. Even top managerial staff have left with 3-4 CEO's amoung them! Even though one may think that I was in the wrong, it's simply not possible for everybody to be wrong. That comes to the reason why I write this letter. There is something drastically wrong with SevenHills. The management is arrogant or plain stupid or a combination of the two. The arrogance can come because of money & political clout. But both these are very fickle commodities. One has to just read the newspapers to see how they are being shamed on a daily basis. I think doctors and other concerned citizens should stand up to these bullies & show them that they are just paper tigers. They cannot do anything without the people's support and it is debatable how many people really trust them. I will list below some of the shady things which have happened in the last 2-3 years. 1.SevenHills does not own the land on which it is built. It belongs to the people of Mumbai. The hospital has delayed implementation of the PPP with the BMC but it has itself acknowledged that it could have complied with its committments of providing 20% of beds for the poor if it had started in a small way. Therefore, it is misleading the public and the judiciary by saying that the BMC is raising unreasonable demands. We & the hospital know that court cases in India can be prolonged for years. Such an outcome is good for sevenhills because it will futher delay the implementation of the PPP where it is obliged to treat 20% of admitted patients for free. 2. The strange thing is that, despite the hospital refusing to treat the poor, it continues to treat the rich. One would like to know on what basis this is being permitted. 3. The hospital is closely associated with the Pune-based builder Avinash Bhosale who has been implicated in several scams, the latest being the 'irrigation scam' where Bhosale has been quoted as being the contractor who has benifitted the most financially. This man is very close to Ajit Pawar, ex-deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, who was forced to quit recently, again in relation to the 'irrigation scam'. Can anything good come from such people of dubious reputation? This scam tainted builder is variously stated in the press as the owner of Soma Enterprises, one of the director of Soma, etc. In the latest web sites it shows that the Chairman of Soma is the elder brother of the "soft-spoken" CMD of SevenHills, Dr. Jitendra Maganti. There is a Amit Bhosale who is the executive director of Avinash Bhosale's Company (ABIL) in Pune and he is also one of the directors of Soma. Anyway, as per the municipal records, the PPP has been signed between the BMC & Seven Hills Health Group and Soma, with Avinash Bhosale being quoted as the owner of Soma. What all this boils to is that SevenHills and its CMD are not what they seem to be. They have very deep pockets and thrive on their political connections. Again the question arises why the BMC signed an agreement with people who have such dubious reputation.