Leader of medical college in India charged in deadly oxygen shortage
NEW DELHI — The chief of the Indian medical college where dozens of sick children died earlier this month after the oxygen supply ran out has been arrested on charges of culpable homicide, Indian authorities have said.
Dr. Rajiv Mishra, who had been chief of Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur until he was recently suspended, was arrested Tuesday along with his wife. On Wednesday, Indian officials disclosed that 386 children had died this month at that hospital, slightly above average.
Many people in India were outraged by the children’s deaths after it emerged that the hospital had failed to pay its bills to an oxygen supplier. Despite repeated warnings from technicians within the hospital and from the oxygen supply company, the oxygen supply was allowed to dwindle to nothing.
Hundreds of children were in the hospital at the time, many in critical condition and on ventilators, and more than 60 died over a period of days in mid-August as the hospital’s oxygen supplies were depleted.
Parents said that they were given plastic hand-operated resuscitators to keep their children alive, and they blamed the hospital for their children’s deaths.
High-ranking government officials insisted that the hospital’s central oxygen supply system was empty for only two hours, and that the shortage was not a factor in the children’s deaths. Several doctors at the hospital, though, said some of the children probably did die from the shortage.
“Dr. Mishra is under police custody for interrogation, and we are trying to arrest others,” said Satyarth Anirudha Pankaj, police chief of Gorakhpur, during a telephone interview Wednesday evening.
In addition to culpable homicide, Mishra was charged with cheating, criminal conspiracy and corruption by a government servant.