In a case of criminal negligence and callous disregard of human life, more than a dozen destitute women died last Sunday after laparoscopic tubectomy operations at a sterilisation camp at Takhatpur block, near the town of Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, and more than 50 are reported to be in a critical state.
Fatalities could easily rise. While an enquiry is on, the most likely cause is that as many as 83 women were operated upon in the course of five hours, which gives an average of one procedure every four minutes.
A day after this shocking incident came to light, the authorities did not bother to take pause. At another official sterilisation venue at the Gaurela hospital in Bilaspur, as many as 26 tubectomies were conducted in the space of an hour, or an operation every two minutes. One woman has died and 20 have developed post-surgery complications.
Apparently there was little time to sterilise the laparoscopy instruments, of which there were too few for so many patients. There was a shortage of medical and paramedical personnel as well.
Patients suffered septicaemia after the procedure. To the utter discredit of the health department, the drugs administered to patients also seem to have been spurious.
Besides, routine clinical examination of those subjected to the surgical procedure to check blood pressure and the like was not conducted.
All of this is suggestive of gargantuan failure on the part of the state government, not to say rampant corruption. It appears the doctor in charge of the tubectomies had been rewarded by the health minister for conducting 50,000 such surgeries in his career.
It is time chief minister Raman Singh stepped forward to answer questions. News accounts suggest that ill-informed and relatively poor women, especially in rural settlements, are being routinely rounded up in Chhattisgarh deemed to be an example of a well-governed BJP state to undergo tubectomy as a family planning measure and are said to be paid about Rs 600 each as incentive.
The government health workers who bring them in like cattle are also paid a certain sum for every woman they deliver for surgery.
This is reminiscent of the days of the Emergency when under Sanjay Gandhi’s evil spell even young men were forced into vasectomies. In this case, however, the emphasis is on women.
Although vasectomy is an easier procedure to perform, women are energetically rounded up to accept sterilisations, given the male bias in society as men fear unreasonably that the procedure causes impotence. In Chhattisgarh, 1,27,111 tubectomies were performed in 2011-12 as against 6,765 vasectomies.
There can be little question that the Raman Singh regime is pandering to male vanities and suppressing the rights of poor women to say no.
