Good morning. Three caesareans at one Kota hospital inside four days, and the hospital’s position is that nothing which followed is connected. Then NMC deletes the regulation behind its ₹1 crore fines, four days before we finish counting what its own stipend list says colleges pay you. And Sunny Deol spends his 69th birthday telling the country that doctors write commissions instead of prescriptions.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
DOCTORS
Two deaths, two explanations, and a third woman still admitted
Reshma, 40, came into Kota’s New Medical College Hospital on 13 October for her fourth caesarean. Live baby at 8.41 am. By that evening her pressure, oxygen and heart rate were all sliding. The ICU got her vitals back. Her kidneys never came back, and nobody could say why. At 3 am her family signed her out against advice. She died on Friday night.
Roshan Bairwa arrived that same Friday evening, referred in as high-risk with severe anaemia. Caesarean that night. Then she bled, and the transfusions did not hold. Dead by 11.30 the next morning.
The hospital says the two have nothing to do with each other, or with May, when 12 women there went into kidney failure after childbirth and five died. Reshma’s family says she was fine until a ward injection. Two diagnoses are being chased in her case, neither confirmed: HELLP, and pregnancy-related thrombotic microangiopathy.
That is 18 maternal deaths across five Rajasthan districts since May. Four medical colleges have investigated and filed. Anita, 30, operated the same Wednesday as Reshma, is still admitted with the same complication.
WHY IT MATTERS
Urine output falling while everything else improves is the sign to chase. HELLP and pregnancy-related TMA both behave exactly like that.
Both Kota women carried a listed risk. The two who bled out at Bhilwara in July carried none. Screening tells you who to watch, not who is safe.
A 3 am discharge against advice is now the hospital’s defence. Write down the condition, the counselling, and who signed.
02 · POLICY
NMC deleted the rulebook behind its ₹1 crore fines
Signed Wednesday. Printed in the Gazette on Friday. Dead from the day it appeared. MSMER-2023 was the price list: up to ₹1 crore per violation for a college, ₹5 lakh for a faculty member filing false papers. Seven colleges paid ₹1 crore each this year for not paying and not disclosing stipends.
The Annual Disclosure Report survives; it stands on the NMC Act, not on this. Everything else now points at “whatever regulations are in force.” No reason given, no replacement named.
03 · THE BIG READ
₹2,000 a month. The college printed ₹25,906 right next to it.
NMC’s stipend list is a 30-page PDF sitting in public, 804 rows long. We read every row. Each one has two columns, the state’s rate and what the college actually pays, and 126 private colleges filled in both. 105 pay less than the number they wrote themselves.
| College | Pays | Printed |
| Bhaskar, Telangana | ₹2,000 | ₹25,906 |
| SVS, Telangana | ₹2,000 | ₹25,906 |
| MNR, Telangana | ₹2,087 | ₹25,906 |
| Narayana, Andhra Pradesh | ₹2,000 | ₹22,527 |
A year of that leaves a Bhaskar intern ₹2.87 lakh short of their own college’s figure. Fifty-eight colleges report ₹5,000 or less. R D Gardi in Ujjain simply wrote “UG- Not given”.
Government pay is a lottery by state, and it runs backwards. Uttar Pradesh pays interns the least in India at ₹12,000, and first-year residents the most at ₹95,594. Survive the internship and you are suddenly in the best-paid state in the country.
04 · DOCTORS
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Doctors
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“Doctors don’t write prescriptions there. They write commissions.”
Sunny Deol’s voiceover in the Suryaa teaser, out Monday on his 69th birthday. He is on the poster with a cigarette in his mouth, two months after telling a podcast his conscience will not let him promote tobacco or pan masala. The internet found his old Santoor pan masala ad inside a week. In cinemas 20 November.
There is a real film in healthcare corruption, and we would happily do the research for it. Procurement files, tender rates, the people who sign them. This one hands the bill to whoever is in casualty at 2 am on ₹2,000 a month.
06 · THE AIR
Delhi sat at 178 last night. Diwali is on 8 November and the stubble has not even started burning. Worst three in the country, then where most of you work:
| Ghazipur |
|
385 | ||
| Dhar |
|
240 | ||
| Amritsar |
|
221 | ||
| New Delhi |
|
178 | ||
| Mumbai |
|
173 | ||
| Kolkata |
|
169 | ||
| Chennai |
|
64 | ||
| Running every issue until Diwali and a fortnight past it. AQI-US scale, aqi.in, 19 Oct 8.18 pm. CPCB numbers, the ones GRAP runs on, are drawn differently. | ||||
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