Teams from Raj, Delhi raid clinic involved in sex determination

Three government officers stood in front of a tea shop on Tuesday, talking to each other in hushed voices, eyes fixed on a building with the board Kiran Ultrasound.

Suddenly, there was a flurry of activity as other officers started closing in on the diagnostic centre. They had received a message — The doctor has said ‘Sorry’.

“Doctors do not directly tell the baby’s sex. They use code words like congratulations and sorry, positive and negative to indicate if it’s a boy or a girl,” said Dr Satyajit Kumar, Delhi’s state programme officer for PC PNDT cell (Pre Conception, Pre Natal Diagnostic Techniques).

The officers had received the message from a pregnant woman, who had agreed to pretend to be a customer of the sex determination clinic. She was asked to meet a nurse in Bahadurgarh at 10.30am, from where she was taken to Janakpuri to meet the nurse’s daughter-in-law who worked in the Patel Nagar clinic. She finally arrived at the clinic at around 2pm.

Meanwhile, about 10 officers from Rajasthan’s PC PNDT bureau and two officers from the Delhi cell caught two women who were trying to flee the clinic. It was revealed that they worked as touts for the doctor.

Inside the clinic, five patients were still waiting for their turn when the officers walked in, one with a camera in hand. They took the doctor, Ashok Kumar Gupta, to a corner and checked his pockets. Along with a visiting card, there were five ₹2,000 notes inside, bearing numbers that had been pre-matched by the team.

“Why did you take the ₹10,000? Please tell us honestly what you have done. It will be better for you,” the officers explained. The doctor, however, kept mum.

After several minutes of being questioned, Gupta admitted that he had charged the decoy patient ₹10,000 for an ultrasound, which usually costs anywhere between a couple of hundreds to a few thousand rupees, depending on body parts being examined and sophistication of the machine.

“Yes, I took the money from her, but I did not tell her the sex of the baby,” he said. And, he hadn’t. He had just said ‘Sorry’.

The doctor, two touts, a sealed ultrasound machine and important documents were taken to four cars waiting outside and taken for investigation to Jaipur.

Back at the clinic, a hassled receptionist was left with patients demanding their refund.