Nashik: After the Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) issued closure notices to 416 private nursing homes, 238 of them have applied for renewal of their licences. The remaining hospitals are expected to renew their licences in the coming few days or else they would be forced to shut down.There are as many as 654 hospitals, clinics, maternity and nursing homes registered with the NMC of which 416 are yet to renew their licences — a mandatory process in every three years.“Out of the 416 nursing and maternity homes that we had sent notices to, 238 have applied for renewal of licences. The files are still coming to us for renewal,” said an NMC official.The official added that they had time till April 15 to get the licences renewed. “We have given April 15 as the deadline of the closure notice. After that we will close down the nursing and maternity homes,” said the official.The NMC had issued notices earlier to health care establishments to get the licences renewed, but the owners allegedly failed to do so. Now, after the final notices giving an ultimatum of April 15 got them into action. “Rules for renewal like change in use of the property, widening staircases and other norms were declared in 1995. We started informing the health establishments about it some years ago. Also, they have to abide by the fire safety norms. We hope to have more applications for renewal by April 15, or else these would be closed down for sure,” said the official.Meanwhile, the NMC also started inspecting sonography centres from Monday and scrutinised 35 centres. The 268 sonography centres are being inspected to see if any of them are involved in sex determination. “We will be summarising our findings of all these centres by May 1. Action against erring sonography centres will be taken after we summarise the data,” said the NMC official.

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