Police arrest Bengal nursing home manager, owner
Police have arrested the owner and manager of a West Bengal nursing home after a teenager died inside its critical care ambulance, which was allegedly manned by an air conditioning mechanic posing as a doctor
Annapurna Nursing Home, where the deceased Arijit Das was being treated, had sent him to Kolkata for further treatment, along with Sheikh Sarfajuddin , an air conditioner mechanic posing as a doctor.
Sarfajuddin and the ambulance driver, Tarapada Sha were arrested on Friday and charged with impersonation, cheating and causing death due to negligence.
On Saturday night, the nursing home’s owner Animesh Mallick and manager Sheikh Rahul Islam were arrested after interrogation.
Police are also looking for a person named Viki, a middleman who arranges ambulances.
The victim was to appear for the class 10 Bengal board exams that began on March 11. His death could have been averted if there was a real doctor, relatives said.
Fake doctors have become a menace in Bengal, with the state’s CID finding more than 500 fake doctors. They have never attended any medical course but treat patients posing as specialists.
The government has launched an exercise to weed them out. The CID has arrested a few dozen such fake physicians.
The ambulance took the boy from Burdwan to Rabindranath Tagore International Institute for Cardiac Sciences, a hospital on Kolkata’s E M Bypass, a distance of more than 100 km.
“I can’t understand why the nursing home passed off an AC mechanic as a doctor. I have lost my only son and want the culprits to be punished,” Arijit’s father, Ranjit Das said.
Family members told the media that they became suspicious when they saw the driver, and not the ‘doctor’, trying to fix the oxygen cylinder on the way.
“We will investigate whether the nursing home was at fault,” said Pranab Roy, the chief medical officer of Health in East Burdwan district.
The boy aspired to become a doctor. He was not keeping well and wrote the first three tests with fever.
According to Das’s relatives, the ambulance charged them ₹16,000, half of which was the doctor’s fees.
“If there was a doctor, he could have provided oxygen to the boy,” said Mandal. The Vajpayee government, which went on to become the first non-Congress regime to complete its full term, comfortably defeated the Opposition in the vote that followed the no-confidence motion.
The NDA secured 312 votes while the Opposition mopped up 186 votes. J Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK (Tamil Nadu) and Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference (Jammu and Kashmir) abstained from voting, while the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati voted in favour of the government.
In 2018, the no-confidence motion moved by YRSCP against the Narendra Modiled government could not be taken due to disruptions. But during the Vajpayee regime, the House managed to take up the motion. The then leader of the Opposition, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, initiated the debate. She spoke in Hindi and charged the Vajpayee government for faltering on several fronts. Senior leaders like George Fernandes, LK Advani, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, Mani Shankar Aiyar and others participated in the debate. Even as many Opposition leaders attacked Fernandes, Vajpayee defended him and went on to call describe the best defence minister India ever had.
Gandhi also accused the Vajpayee government of undermining India’s nonaligned position in world affairs, a charge denied by Vajpayee. The debate went on till late at night and Vajpayee stood up to reply only at 11pm. In his famous reply, he taunted Gandhi and said as if the Congress president has overused a thesaurus to pick words. “Come to the maidaan (field) for an electoral bout,” Vajpayee told Gandhi.
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