No lessons learnt from Chhattisgarh incident where women were sterilized in dismal conditions, kept on floor
By Mahmood Asim, TwoCircles.net,
Azamgarh: There were no hospital beds, there were inadequate facilities and to top of it, there was no electricity. Still, as many as 50 women were sterilized by the doctors at a Primary Health Centre (PHC) in the district.
The shocking incident took place at the PHC at Martine Ganj in the district, the constituency of Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav. The appalling incident was led by a team of doctors led by Dr SP Tiwari, who reached the venue only around 3.30 pm on the day of the sterilization camp.
(Courtesy: kractivist.org)
Since morning, 60 women had already registered their names for sterilization camp. By the time the procedures started only around 8 pm, the inverter, the generator and other system to supply powers had already died down. Doctors put the lives of women at risk and went ahead with the sterilization using light from torches and mobile phones. As many as 50 procedures were carried out in just four-and-a-half hours.
According to a report published in Hindi daily Amar Ujala, the authorities defended their move reasoning that “the ongoing polio drive prompted them to use the invertor to cool the vaccines and the generator was out not functional. So they carried out the sterilization in the light of torch.”
Further, according to the blog KRACTIVISM , almost 60 operations were being held in just four-and-half-hours keeping the average of 4.5 minutes per sterilization. It also quoted medical superintendent Dr Amita Agrawal saying there were only eight beds in the hospital and expressed inability to provide more beds to these women.
According to the rules of the central government, more than 30 operations could not be conducted in day but rules are made to ignore here.
When Martine Ganj PHC in-charge Dhanajay Singh was contacted by media, then he clarified that there was no electric facility at the time of operation and power was used to cool the polio vaccine.
It was evident that the doctors here had taken no lessons from what had happened in Chhattisgarh. As many as 45 women were sterilized and left on earthen floor there in a dilapidated building in Chhattisgarh last year. Later, dozens of women operated for sterilisation were left unattended on the hospital floor in cold weather at Rahul Sankritayan District Women Hospital in Azamgarh.