Operations in the night kept locals in dark

GOHANA, SONEPAT: Away from the bustle at the heart of Sonepat city, Gordhan Colony in Gohana is a small, leafy neighbourhood of old cement houses with peeling paint and large courtyards where cattle amble about. Most of the residents in this tightly knit community have lived here for generations and are farmers, attached to the quiet of rural life.

It is in this neighbourhood that Sonu Rohilla, 37, moved into in 2019. He told his neighbours that he was a doctor at a government hospital in Sonepat and set up a hospital in a 12-room, two-storey house painted orange, a large billboard covering its front facade. During weekdays, neighbours said, the brown gate in front was always shut, and there were hardly any patients. Yet, without fail, at sundown and on weekends, expensive cars would pull up outside the hospital and park on the narrow road outside, breaking the idyll of the leafy neighbourhood.

“The cars were mostly sedans and SUVS and while all of them would park scattered, one would enter the hospital. We could often see patients get out of the car and get inside. They wouldn’t come out,” said Satyawan Saini, a neighbour who ran a grocery store.

Rohilla told curious residents that his evening guests were patients who would drive down from Delhi for treatment.

But unknown to them, that orange house was the nerve centre of the Capital’s biggest illegal organ transplant racket in years – one that was busted by Delhi Police on Wednesday when it arrested 10 people from different places.

“We always believed he was a doctor. Everybody here used to call him ‘doctor saab’. He used to write to MD (Doctor of Medicine) with his name on his prescriptions,” said Gaurav Saini, 28, who lived two houses down.

Investigators say the gang members lured desperate young men to sell their kidneys for ₹3-₹4 lakh and sold the organs to rich receivers for ₹30-₹40 lakh. And Rohilla used this house in Gordhan colony to operate on the men, and sell the organs.

Police say that far from being a government hospital doctor, Rohilla had no medical degree at all, having pursued a course in alternative medicine. It was not known where he studied. Members of the gang who were nabbed in Delhi, led the police to the facility in Gohana, where Rohilla was arrested.

Local residents say Rohilla constructed the Sri Ramachandra Hospital three years ago and installed large billboards of him smiling and a list of medical services offered by the facility. In Gohana, where healthcare infrastructure is often stretched, not many facilities offered a bouquet of services including urology, paediatrics, dialysis and, at first, some people made a beeline for the hospital. But they all found that the charges were too high. “Usually, OPD charges here are ₹20 or ₹30 but this doctor would charge ₹200. People initially came but stopped later. That’s why this hospital ran into losses,” said Gaurav.

By the end of 2021, though, something changed. Residents said Rohilla renovated the hospital, added one more operation table, bought more equipment and constructed a few more rooms on the first floor. In addition, he covered the boards with white paint. “We wondered why he was doing that and we all felt that something was odd but we could never understand,” said Satyawan.

Yet, no one suspected anything amiss. The hospital continued to function, and its four staffers continued to report for duty everyday. “Rohilla showed us the hospital after renovation also. In fact, a few weeks ago, he had told me that he wanted to expand and asked if he could rent the adjacent house which belongs to my paternal uncle,” Gaurav said.

That was not to be. On Sunday, Delhi Police reached Gohana around 9:30am and climbed on top of the terrace of buildings next door before finally raiding the hospital, locals said.

Gordhan Colony has gone back to being quiet, but the shock and horror linger.

“God knows what he was doing to patients if he wasn’t a doctor,” said Satyawan.