A father brought his three-year-old daughter to an orthopaedic surgeon’s nursing home in Roorkee because something was wrong with her left hand. She was operated on the same day. He paid ₹7,800. When the plaster came off about three weeks later, the hand did not work.

In the months that followed he took her to four more doctors. He later told the consumer forum that each of them said the operation had ruined her hand. None of them put it on paper. The district forum in Haridwar decided the case in 2019, on a day when nobody turned up for the surgeon, and ordered him to pay ₹9,00,000 plus ₹7,500 in costs.

He appealed. The Uttarakhand State Commission pronounced in October 2026, seven years and four months later, and threw the whole thing out. What ended it was a prescription already sitting on the record, written nine days after the operation, carrying a referral to a physiotherapist. The date on that entry was smudged and hard to read. The referral was not. And the father’s own complaint never said she had gone.

A woman had a tubectomy at a government hospital in Arcot, right after delivering her third child. Three years later she was pregnant again.

A single judge of the Madras High Court decided the surgery must have gone wrong. He put it on the State to prove otherwise, and awarded her ₹3 lakh plus free schooling for the child.

The appeal bench disagreed in five words. This is not the law. The Supreme Court settled this in 2005. A pregnancy after sterilisation does not by itself make anyone liable. You have to show the surgery was done badly. The single judge had quoted that very ruling in his own order.

The bench also took the failure rate as medical fact. About 5 in every 1,000 women conceive in the first year. One in two hundred.

She gets ₹60,000 under the Family Planning Indemnity Scheme. That is not a negligence award. The scheme pays on failure alone, half from the Centre and half from the State, with no doctor found at fault. The State has four weeks to pay. If she wants more she has eight weeks to sue, and the bench listed five questions a trial must answer first, including what her consent form is worth.

Read the five questions →

From 9 November, NPPA caps the trade margin on 137 anti-cancer medicines at 30 per cent. These sat outside price control, so companies printed whatever MRP they liked. Some will now fall by up to 70 per cent. Nothing in the order tells a patient their drug got cheaper. In December, the ones who ask at the counter will be the ones whose doctor mentioned it in October.

See the order at a glance →

In the 2025-26 annual report, chairman Noel Tata set out a network of 40 to 50 not-for-profit general hospitals, cross-subsidised so that patients who can pay fund the care of those who cannot. No locations, no timeline, no investment figure. The Trusts disbursed ₹1,556.31 crore last year, ₹105.97 crore of it on healthcare.

Roughly ₹2,900 crore of their income is meanwhile sitting undelivered. Tata Sons recommended ₹1,10,717 a share for FY26, a total payout of ₹4,478.58 crore, but the AGM listed for 18 August was adjourned for want of quorum after the Sir Ratan Tata Trust could not nominate a representative.

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Rohtak opened at 302, fourteen times the national standard and the worst in the country. Six of the seven worst cities sit in Haryana, Punjab and western UP. Your respiratory OPD will tell you before any dashboard does.

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