NEW DELHI —It has been four days since Gauri Bai has seen her daughter-in-law, Rashmi, who became ill after a procedure at a mass sterilization camp in the town of Bilaspur on Saturday. Rashmi, a 27-year-old mother of two, started vomiting and complaining of severe pain the day after she went to the camp, where she and dozens of other women were given tubal ligations by a doctor working at breakneck speed. Her family rushed her to the hospital Sunday, but they have been barred from seeing her since Monday and fear the worst.
“We suspect she’s already dead,” said Gauri Bai, 54. “We thought the government is running the program for the benefit of the poor, but they have cheated us. We want the guilty to be punished. They have destroyed my family. Who will take care of these little children?”
Public anger is running high in Bilaspur, in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, as authorities expand their investigation in the wake of Saturday’s tragedy, in which 13 women died and dozens more were sickened.
Authorities said they raided two drug companies and began examining sterilization procedures carried out Sunday and Monday at two other camps where one woman died and others fell ill.
The doctor who performed the operations, R.K. Gupta, was arrested late Wednesday and charged with culpable homicide and negligence.
Sonmani Borah, the divisional commissioner of Bilaspur, said 122 women are being treated at various area hospitals and that a judicial inquiry has been ordered into the incident, along with police and medical board investigations.
“We are convinced that something went wrong, and those responsible will be dealt with severely. As of now nothing can be ruled out,” Borah said.
In the wake of the tragedy, a debate has arisen about whether the women had been coerced or coaxed into having sterilization surgeries and whether the health workers were pressuring them to meet government targets.
Although the national government has said since the 1990s that it no longer sets public targets for the number of women sterilized, Borah said the district family planning department was trying to reach its annual goals when it organized the mass drives in recent days.
Women were given 1400 rupees, or about $23, for the surgeries. A “motivator,” usually a local public health worker, was paid 200 rupees, or about $3.25, to bring a woman to the camp.
“The district family planning department have annual targets, and they try to convince more and people into these camps,” Borah said. “We will see if there was breach of protocol on part of the officials.”
Gupta, the doctor who performed 83 surgeries in about six hours, told reporters he had been pressured to meet sterilization quotas given to him by local authorities.
“It was not my fault — the administration pressured me to meet targets,” the doctor said, according to NDTV, an Indian news channel.
Sterilization is the most prevalent method of family planning in India, government data show.
The federal Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has often been accused of relying too heavily on the quick fix of sterilization as a method of birth control rather than on pills, condoms or public education. Male sterilization remains rare, and the vast majority of those being sterilized are women, statistics show.
“The incident has exposed the dire state of public health services, particularly in rural India,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “While women should be informed about available methods of contraception so that they can make informed decisions, the government has adopted a target-driven approach to female sterilizations, leading to compromises in medical practices.”
In much of the country, authorities aggressively pursue targets by threatening health workers with salary cuts and dismissals, Human Rights Watch said, meaning that the workers often pressure women to undergo the treatment without providing enough information on complications or irreversibility.
