This is one of the several mails that I’m used to receive daily, but this perhaps reflects best the state of anarchism that prevails in India’s No. 1 engineering institute, though at somebody’s cost. More comments after the mail …
Dear Friends, Please go through the following mail which was received by us in the morning. I thought that it is imperative that we as a part of the campus community knew what is going on. What good are rules (of whether or not a person is to be treated in HC) if they lead to death of a child? -- This is to share an incident which reflects the state of affairs for the disenfranchised in our Institute of excellence. I suspect this incident would not be reported by anybody in authority in the Institute and hence would not reach most of us. In this case too we got to know of it just by chance, as would be evident from the account, which makes us believe that occurrence of such incidents may not be a rarity after all, but that is just not shared with the community. A similar incident happened a month ago and the sequence of events are much similar. This account is to inform the community of this incident, acknowledge a feeling of collective shame that this could occur in an Institute which claims to be the best, and hopefully to evoke some collective action to prevent such occurrences in future. I am sure of the facts, as I got to know of it from a first person account and yet would not name anybody to avoid unnecessary personal vilification. This is the system and not the individuals involved. On Sunday morning at about 4.15 am one of the canteen owners of one of the Halls was going back after work when he chanced upon a crowd of migrant workers at the security crossing near the Motor Transport/ air strip road. Apparently a boy, whose family had been employed in the construction site of the Environment Engineering building had been bitten by something poisonous (they were not sure whether it was a scorpion or a snake), in his sleep. The workers including the family consisting of the father a brother and a younger sister (his mother is no longer alive) had come to the SIS for help. The boy who was around 12-13 seemed to have been bitten around 3 in the morning and was alive though unconscious. The SIS guards (there were around 20-25 of them there) kept urging the workers to take the boy to the city hospital but refused to extend any help. The group of migrant workers did not know anything about the city, and this is usual because they are brought from far of places like Malda and Chhattisgarh by the contractor and are herded back at the end of their term. The canteen owner requested the SIS to lend their jeep for transporting the boy to the Health Center. The SIS guards refused to ask for their jeep (though several of them had their walkie talkie) and instead told this man that the boy would not be treated in the Health Center and hence has to be taken to the city. At this point the Canteen Owner decided to take the boy in his motorcycle, along with another worker to hold the inert form, to the Health Center. At the Health Center, the person at the desk refused to entertain the case, when he came to know that the boy was not related to an Institute employee and was neither a student. The canteen owner tried to impress upon the person that the case was very serious and the boy may just survive if only the hospital intervened and the formalities and the expenses could be handled later. He also volunteered to get the health card of his father who is an Institute employee, as treating guests is routinely done in the HC. The attendant at the desk refused to comply but conceded to give the phone number of the doctor on duty. He told the canteen owner that he may call up the doctor to check if she would treat the boy, but not to mention that he was calling from the HC, but tell her that he was calling from one of the Halls. The canteen owner called the doctor, who when she realized that it involved the child of worker, was extremely annoyed and said that this facility was not available to them. When the canteen owner pleaded that the case was serious and may turn fatal she apparently shouted 'which language do you understand?' and slammed the phone down. After that the canteen owner decided to take the child to the city and requested the hospital attendant to provide the services of the ambulance so that he could be taken as soon as possible and anyway it is extremely difficult to negotiate the GT road with an unconscious person. But he was refused even that. The boy was still alive till that point. The rest of the story in short - the canteen owner took the boy to a nearby nursing home in Kalyanpur but that setup was not equipped to handle snake bites. Then he drove with the unconscious boy all the way to the Hallett (medical college) - the doctor on duty was much more prompt and immediately attended to the boy, but unfortunately he had already died. Then this canteen owner drove all the way back to the campus with a dead child in the pillion. As he ended his account 'bilkul kuch achcha nahin lag raha hai tab se - health centre hote hue ek chote se bachche ko marne de sakten hain - kyun ki woh ek mazdoor ka bachcha hai sirf isiliye?' -- Who sent this mail is immaterial. The point is do we as the community have an answer to this? It's not about just shouting out loud against the people who ignored the poor child's state. It's about identifying what makes people so insensitive and taking measures so that such inhumanity is not showcased again. I still hope we are human.
Firstly some full forms to make the above mail more comprehensible …
HC — Health Center, SIS — Security Intelligence Services, GT Road –Grant Trunk Road (Connecting the institute concerned to Kanpur city)
One more thing which has not been said about in the mail is that apparently even if the doctor at HC would have agreed to attend the boy, the boy would have been killed sooner as there are only eight General Physicians at this HC who perhaps do not even qualify to be General Physician … one more incident … last week itself one of the doctor at this HC told one of my batchmate that he was sufferin from malaria, only to be brushed aside by the outside “practising” docs. [:x] … Then, we proudly claim ourselves to be one of the world’s best institute … an institute par xcellence … compare ourselves to MIT and Princeton … the strength of the campus is around 10000 … even going by the Govt. of India’s norms about setting up hospitals based on regions’ population, we should be havin a little better HC than one with only eight General Physicians.
If this isn’t height of anarchism, then plz let me know what else it is?
