Below that: 57 burnt eyes counted at two hospitals, with Diwali five weeks away.

A man of 53 came in with a high anal fistula. He was on a blood thinner and on antihypertensives, both running close to a decade, and he told the surgeon so. Surgery was advised, done twelve days later without incident, and he went home the next morning. He was back on post-operative day four with pain, back again three weeks after that with the wound infected and inflamed, and on day 34 he was on a table at a second hospital. Then he filed, and he filed five allegations.

Four of them failed. On the fifth, the surgeon’s reply said the pre-operative blood sugar test had been done. The hospital filed its own reply separately and argued something else entirely: that a test like that is not needed for a minor procedure unless the patient is already a known diabetic. Both cannot be right, the commission noted, and went looking for the report. There was none, anywhere on the record, and the discharge summary mentioned none either. Two days before the second operation somebody finally checked. Fasting 132, post-meal 205.

A carbide gun is a length of PVC pipe with calcium carbide at the bottom, water poured on top and a kitchen lighter held at the open end. Sixty to two hundred rupees, and two out of three of the Patna boys had learned to build one off the internet. The reaction is slow and it does not always finish. The pipe goes quiet, the boy leans over the end to see why, and the delayed burst comes straight up into his face. AIIMS Delhi logged 20 more eyes over the month that followed, median age 16, the right eye hit 33 times out of 37 because the right hand is the one holding the pipe. Both teams grafted amniotic membrane early, both published in the same journal supplement on the same day, and they reached opposite conclusions about what the cornea is left holding afterwards. Nobody has reconciled it, and Diwali is five weeks off.

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We counted every record in the Medical Counselling Committee’s Round 1 allotment list, all 26,889 of them, across 1,301 pages. Thirty-six branches were on offer and eight of them turn up anywhere inside rank 100. Rank 1 took General Medicine at RML, rank 2 the same subject at Kozhikode, rank 3 back at RML, and rank 4 was the first person to change anything at all. Two candidates inside the top 100 took no seat. Not one of the top 1,000 took a non-clinical branch, and the first one in the country goes at rank 1,703. Further down the table the pattern turns on itself: the branch with more seats than any other stayed open until rank 19,028, and Dermatology shut before Radiology did, on roughly half as many open seats.

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Day two in the dressing department, he picked up her phone and started going through her photographs. She objected, he handed it back, and she let it go. Four days later, same shift, same room, no patients in it, and the door pushed partly shut. What she did in the hour after she walked out is the part worth reading if you supervise interns.

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A video circulating since Sunday carries one account of why a woman delivered outside the District Women’s Hospital: labour already started, a full day of being told there was still time, and ₹10,000 asked for. The hospital’s CMS gave reporters a different account the same day, and almost nobody is carrying it. The uncomfortable part for doctors is sitting inside that defence.

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