The Rashtrapati Bhawan is flooded with appeals to
President-elect Pratibha Patil even before she formally takes over on Wednesday and these include half a dozen appeals from the people of her hometown Jalgaon to 'do something' for getting them better roads, water and electricity.
Over a hundred congratulatory letters received in the Rashtrapati Bhawan since her election on Saturday have been already forwarded by the staff to the managers at her residence.
Among the letters addressed to her on controversial issues is one seeking an immediate intervention of 'honourable Madam President' for action against the government officials supplying faulty HIV testing kits for detecting AIDS victims.
The demand for a probe into the supply of faulty kits by the government AIDS officials despite an adverse report of a Mumbai hospital has come from a US-based doctor Kunal Saha in a two-page
letter.
The case is, however, being contested in the Supreme Court with Saha as a party and as such little that Pratibha Tai may be able to do in the subjudice matter, sources in the Rashtrapati Bhawan said.
Saha's case is that a firm was given the contract to produce kits for West Bengal in December 2004 despite a complaint received by the National Aids Control Organisation from a Mumbai hospital about the defective kits supplied to it by the same firm.
He calls it a HIV test kit scam that is earning a bad name to India in the international forums for using substandard kits that cannot detect HIV correctly. He even intervened in an anticipatory bail application filed by the firm's owner to escape arrest.