Doctors get jail, Rs 2.5 lakh fine for boy’s death

13 Aug’10, Friday, Sairam Sanath Kumar, The Indian Express

For 66-year-old P K Batra, Thursday marked another step towards justice after a 15-year-long legal battle. Additional Sessions Judge D K Sharma upheld the conviction — by a Metropolitan Magistrate’s court — of Dr Omkar M Parmar and Dr Naipendra Nath Dutt for causing the death of Batra’s son Gaurav due to negligence in 1995. The court sentenced the two to six months of rigorous imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 2.5 lakh each.

On June 3, 1995, Batra took his 13-year old son Gaurav, who was suffering from tonsillitis, to Dr Parmar, an ENT surgeon, who advised surgery. Gaurav was taken to Sukhda Hospital after a week, where Dr Parmar performed the surgery. After the surgery, Dr Parmar came out of the operation theatre and informed Batra that his son was fine. Two hours later, Gaurav was brought out of the operation theatre unconscious and developed complications, but as Dr Parmar and Dr Dutt had left the hospital by then, there was no doctor in the hospital to treat him. Gaurav died soon after.

The same day, Batra filed a police complaint against the two doctors for their gross negligence in leaving the hospital and failing to provide post-operative care to the teen. The next day, Gaurav’s body was sent for postmortem to AIIMS, where the report said the boy had died due to suffocation directly resulting from the surgery. The police then registered a case.

Batra, a management consultant at the time, left his job to involve himself fully in the case. On Thursday, the Additional Sessions court held that the doctors were negligent in their duty by failing to attend to him, and pronounced them guilty of medical negligence under Section 304 A of theIndian Penal Code(IPC).

“When there was no doctor in the hospital to attend to my child, an anaesthetist who was visiting the hospital to get his father discharged rushed to my son’s help. But it was too late,” Batra said. “The judgment is a moment of truth for me, but the loss of my son is irreparable,” he added.

Batra’s counsel J R Priani said, “The Supreme Court has laid down that medical professionals can be prosecuted only after a police inquiry and an expert opinion. Both were done on time in this case.”

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