25 May 2021 A health worker places a defunct ventilator in an Amritsar hospital amid the COVID-19 second wave on 14 May 2021. That month, news broke that hundreds of PM-CARES ventilators in Punjab were lying unused because they had not been installed or repaired. NARINDER NANU / AFP /Getty Images A health worker places a defunct ventilator in an Amritsar hospital amid the COVID-19 second wave on 14 May 2021. That month, news broke that hundreds of PM-CARES ventilators in Punjab were lying unused because they had not been installed or repaired. NARINDER NANU / AFP /Getty Images In May 2020, Gurpreet Singh Chandbaja, the founder of a non-profit that works with cancer patients, first raised the issue of unused ventilators at the Guru Gobind Singh Medical College and Hospital, in Punjab’s Faridkot district. He spoke to the medical superintendent about the unused ventilators, which were among 809 units that the centre had allotted to Punjab under the PM-CARES fund. Over the next year, Chandbaja visited the hospital multiple times, and saw more ventilators gathering dust each visit. Finally, in May this year, Chandbaja took a photo of dozens of unused ventilators in the hospital, which made its way to Kultar Singh Sandhwan, the Aam Aadmi Party’s member of legislative assembly from Faridkot’s Kotkapura city. Sandhwan tweeted the image on 11 May. Soon after, news broke that the Punjab government was yet to install or repair hundreds of unused ventilators.