Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana

What is Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana?

Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana is a Karnataka government emergency health scheme that pays for the first 48 hours of trauma care given to a road accident victim, up to Rs 25,000 per victim. The Health and Family Welfare Department funds it, and Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust. The autonomous society that runs Karnataka's health assurance schemes, settles the hospital claims.

The scheme was launched in March 2016 and is named after Harish Nanjappa, a young man who was injured in a road accident in February 2016, lay without help, and donated his eyes shortly before he died. The scheme's name, sometimes written in Kannada transliteration as Mukhyamantri Santhwana Harish Yojane, carries the word santwana, meaning consolation.

Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana exists to solve one specific problem: the hour after a crash. In that hour, a hospital that fears an unpaid bill hesitates, a family that fears a bill hesitates, and the injured person loses the window in which bleeding can be stopped and airways secured. The scheme removes the money question entirely from the first two days.

What makes this scheme unusual

• No income test. BPL and APL families are treated identically.
• No residence test. A traveller from another state, or a foreign national, injured on a Karnataka road is covered on the same terms.
• No application. There is no form, no portal registration and no waiting for sanction. The hospital treats first and claims later.
• Private hospitals included. According to reporting on the scheme's rollout, around 280 hospitals were notified, including roughly 80 private hospitals alongside taluk hospitals, district hospitals and medical college hospitals.

Who is eligible for Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana?

You are covered if:

• You are injured in a road traffic accident that occurs on a road within Karnataka.
• You are taken to a government hospital or a hospital notified or empanelled under the scheme.
• Treatment begins within the emergency window, and the claim relates to care given in the first 48 hours after the accident.

Coverage does not depend on who you are. Pedestrians, two-wheeler riders, pillion riders, car occupants, bus passengers, cyclists, lorry drivers and bystanders struck by a vehicle are all treated alike. Ration card colour, caste, income, employment, insurance status and citizenship are irrelevant. A tourist from Tamil Nadu and a resident of Kalaburagi have the same entitlement.

Where the scheme does not reach, you are not eligible if:

• The injury did not arise from a road traffic accident. Industrial accidents, falls at home, assaults, burns and drowning are outside this particular scheme, though other Karnataka health schemes may cover them.
• The accident occurred outside Karnataka, even if you are a Karnataka resident. Your own state or the central road accident scheme applies instead.
• The treatment falls after the 48-hour window. Continuing care is not refused, but it is billed to Ayushman Bharat Arogya Karnataka, to motor insurance, or to the patient.
• The expense exceeds the Rs 25,000 ceiling for the emergency period. The balance moves to the patient's other cover.

Nobody "applies" and therefore nobody is technically rejected. The practical failure is different: a hospital that is not notified under the scheme, or that insists on a deposit anyway. That is a grievance, not an eligibility problem, and the route to fix it is described below.

What documents are required?

Unidentified and unconscious patients are still treated. Identification is completed later by the hospital and the police.

How to apply for Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana cover

There is no application form and no portal registration for this scheme. The "application" is the act of reaching a notified hospital and having the case recorded as a road accident. These are the steps that make that happen:

1. Call 108 immediately. Arogya Kavacha, Karnataka's free emergency ambulance service, is the fastest route to a hospital that can handle trauma. Give the exact location, the number of people injured and the nature of the injuries.
2. Move the victim to the nearest capable hospital. If an ambulance is not available, any vehicle will do. Karnataka, like the rest of India, protects Good Samaritans. A person who takes an accident victim to hospital cannot be detained for questioning or forced to pay the bill.
3. Tell the hospital it is a road accident case and name the scheme. Say the words "Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana" at the registration counter. The hospital records a medico-legal case, informs the police and starts treatment without a deposit.
4. Hand over identity details when you can. Aadhaar or any photo ID of the injured person, plus the accident time and place, lets the hospital complete its claim file. Do not delay treatment to fetch documents.
5. Ask for the discharge summary, the case sheet and an itemised bill before leaving. These are the documents you will need for motor insurance, for an employer's claim, or for a Motor Accident Claims Tribunal petition.
6. Plan for day three. Before the 48 hours end, ask the hospital's Arogya Mitra help desk whether the patient qualifies under Ayushman Bharat Arogya Karnataka for continued treatment, and start that paperwork.

How does the hospital get paid?

Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana is a reimbursement scheme on the supply side. The hospital treats the victim, records the case as a road traffic accident with the supporting medico-legal entry, and files a claim with Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust under the Health and Family Welfare Department. The patient neither pays nor claims. If a hospital asks the family to pay and promises a refund later, that is contrary to how the scheme is designed.

Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust is the same body that administers Karnataka's other health assurance schemes, which is why the same Arogya Mitra help desks inside government and empanelled hospitals are the point of contact for questions.

How does this fit with other road accident cover?

Four different systems can pay for a road accident in Karnataka, and they stack rather than compete:

• Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana, the first 48 hours, up to Rs 25,000, no eligibility test.
• Cashless Treatment of Road Accident Victims Scheme, 2025 — notified by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, a national scheme for cashless trauma care at designated hospitals.
• Ayushman Bharat Arogya Karnataka, Karnataka's main health assurance scheme, which covers continuing treatment for eligible families beyond the emergency window.
• Motor insurance and the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal, compensation for the injury itself, for lost earnings and for permanent disability, claimed against the insurer of the vehicle at fault.

Because of this overlap, the single most useful thing a family can do is collect paper: the FIR or police memo, the medico-legal case number, the discharge summary, all bills and the vehicle number of the offending vehicle.

What goes wrong, and how to fix it

• The hospital demands a deposit. Point out that the case is a road accident within the first 48 hours. If the hospital still refuses, escalate to the District Health Officer and file a grievance on 1902.
• The hospital is not notified under the scheme. Not every nursing home is empanelled. Stabilisation still cannot be refused, but the patient may need to be shifted to a government or empanelled hospital once stable.
• No medico-legal case was recorded. Without the MLC entry the hospital cannot claim, and the family loses the base document for an insurance claim. Ask for the MLC number before discharge.
• The bill crosses Rs 25,000 within 48 hours. The scheme ceiling is per victim. The excess must come from Ayushman Bharat Arogya Karnataka, private insurance or the family, so start the Arogya Karnataka process on day one rather than at discharge.
• The accident happened on the border. Jurisdiction follows the location of the crash, not the residence of the victim.

Where to complain

• 1902; Karnataka Janaspandana, the Integrated Public Grievance Redressal System, covering the Health and Family Welfare Department along with 40 other departments. Grievances can also be filed online at ipgrs.karnataka.gov.in.
• 108; Arogya Kavacha ambulance, for the emergency itself.
• District Health Officer of the district where the hospital is located, for refusal of admission or a demand for payment.
• Arogya Mitra desk inside the hospital, for scheme-related questions during the admission.

Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana costs the patient nothing. No agent, broker or middleman has any role in it, and any demand for a facilitation payment should be reported on 1902.

A note on published figures

Karnataka has not maintained a single dedicated public portal for this scheme; its details sit within the Health and Family Welfare Department and Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust. The Rs 25,000 ceiling, the 48-hour window and the roughly 280 notified hospitals are as reported at the scheme's launch and in subsequent Karnataka press coverage. Some aggregator websites describe the scheme as a one-time cash payment of Rs 25,000 to Rs 50,000 to families; that description does not match the scheme's design as a hospital-side emergency treatment cover. Before relying on a figure for a live case, confirm the current ceiling with the Arogya Mitra desk at the treating hospital or with the District Health Officer.

How to check your application status

Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana has no citizen application, no case number and no online portal login for the patient or family, so there is nothing to track in the way you would track a pension or scholarship application. The claim that moves through the system is the hospital's claim, filed with Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust, not a claim filed by the patient. Even so, a family often needs to confirm one specific thing: that the hospital actually billed the scheme for the first 48 hours rather than quietly billing the patient. Here is how to check that.

1. Ask the hospital's Arogya Mitra help desk directly, before discharge if possible. Every government hospital and empanelled private hospital under Karnataka's health assurance schemes has an Arogya Mitra desk, and this is the correct first point of contact. Ask specifically whether the admission was recorded under Mukhyamantri Santwana Harish Yojana and whether the claim has been submitted to Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust.
2. Check the discharge bill line by line. If the first 48 hours of treatment appear as a separate, zero-value or scheme-billed line item rather than folded into the patient's payable total, the claim has been correctly routed. If the entire bill, including the emergency window, is charged to the family, the scheme was not applied and this needs to be raised before payment, not after.
3. If the hospital cannot or will not confirm claim status, escalate to the District Health Officer of the district where the hospital is located. The DHO's office can confirm with Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust whether a given hospital is notified under the scheme and whether it is submitting claims correctly.
4. Call 1902, the Karnataka Janaspandana / Integrated Public Grievance Redressal System helpline, if a notified hospital has billed the family for the emergency window despite the scheme's coverage. This is a grievance about a specific admission, not a status query on a pending form, and 1902 is the right channel because the Health and Family Welfare Department sits within its scope.
5. Keep the discharge summary and itemised bill. Because there is no personal application number to quote, the discharge summary, the medico-legal case (MLC) number and the itemised bill are what any office, from the Arogya Mitra desk to the DHO, will ask for to look up the case on their side.

In short: there is nothing for a patient to log into and check, but there is a real way to confirm the scheme was actually applied to your bill, and it runs through the hospital's own help desk first and the District Health Officer or 1902 if that does not resolve it.