Flourishing Trade of Spurious Medicines at R G Kar
A detailed investigation by the CBI and ED reveals a horrifying trail of spurious medicines, illegal assets, and rampant corruption at West Bengal’s R G Kar Medical College, implicating former principal Dr. Sandeep Ghosh and his wife Dr. Sangeeta Ghosh.
Scene 1: A child was administered a capsule after an operation in a state-run hospital in north Calcutta. More than 36 hours after the operation, the capsule which failed to dissolve, was recovered intact in his excreta by a nurse. Post dissolution, the medicine was supposed to have aided healing as well as post-operative cure of the disease the child had been suffering from. The shocked nurse reported the matter to her higher ups in vain because none dared to raise any alarm.
Scene 2: An orthopaedic surgeon conducted a successful operation on an ailing middle-aged man and advised the attending nurse to inject a pair of ampules twice daily for quick recovery. The nurse, after collecting the same from the central drug store of the hospital, found to her horror that ampules contained distilled water only! The operation failed miserably as the ampules could not be organised within 48 hours by the relatives of the patient.
Scene 3: A young lady hailing from Bongaon in North 24 Parganas district who had been suffering from an acute labour pain, was rushed to that hospital and admitted to the female ward of the Emergency. The doctors decided to immediately conduct a caesarean and asked the attending nurses to push some injections. The lady expired in the operation table, the baby survived though. Later, it was discovered that all injections were spurious.
There could be dozens and dozens of such horrendous scenes listed up that had occurred in the last four years or so in West Bengal’s one of the premiere hospitals now under the intense scanner of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). By now, our readers must have been able to gauge the hospital under reference – the R G Kar Medical College & Hospital which has by now acquired a notoriety, thanks to its suspended principal Dr(?) Sandeep Ghosh.
Ghosh had obviously ensured a deeply entrenched chain of selected partners-in-crime through a few hand-picked house staff and of course his wife Dr Sangeeta Ghosh who was posted there as an assistant professor.
As the minute layers of Ghosh’s crime including the alleged ghastly rape and murder of the young doctor Tilottama are being unearthed by sleuths of CBI, one overriding question has been seriously perturbing the central investigating agency; what has prevented the state health directorate as well as health secretary from initiating measures to mitigate this deadly trail of mishaps of innocent patients in the government-run hospital?
Some doctors and a few nurses who dared to raise the issue at an appropriate level, were either advised to ‘mind their business’ or denied any hearing at all.
A flourishing trade of spurious medicines in the R G Kar which the CBI is believed to have collected ample proof of (thanks to the courage of those doctors & nurses whose identity has been closely guarded), must have satisfied the Supreme Court Chief Justice Hon’ble D Y Chandrachud. It was not for nothing that the Hon’ble Chief Justice told a packed court during the last hearing on September 17 that the CBI status report submitted in a sealed envelope was quite grave in nature. And the central agency must be allotted more time to investigate the dastardly crime.
The strong message of the top court is certain to have dampened the spirit and brash observations of a particular MP and senior advocate of the ruling clique who took an eerie pleasure in deriding CBI. “Kisssue korte parbe na CBI” (CBI can’t crack anything) was his oft-repeated quote that has by now turned into a popular meme.
According to a senior doctor of the hospital whose identity the sleuths have declined to divulge, the issue of burgeoning supply of fake and spurious medicines in the hospital had been raked up during a meeting between him and the arrested principal. The latter reportedly lost his temper and asked the doctor to leave his room for raising ‘unsubstantiated matters.’ The doctor who decided to report the issue to the state health directorate, started getting threatening calls in his phone immediately after the fracas and finally opted for a transfer out.
The CBI sleuths are believed to have gathered some chilling documents of the trade of spurious medicines that flourished during the regime of Ghosh. This is in addition to the biomedical waste business that Ghosh had resorted to, roping in three traders of Bangladesh and which eastindiastory.com has already reported.
The CBI investigation has reportedly revealed how Ghosh had expanded this business by establishing an elaborate network of henchmen, three of whom are already under CBI custody. “Actually, the laptop recovered from the residence of the sister-in-law of Ghosh and hard disks of other computers have provided some vital clues,” sources told eastindiastory.com.
Since the CBI does not have any jurisdiction to investigate illegal assets of a person, the Enforcement Directorate(ED) took it over. The documents with ED confirmed that the couple owned a flat in Murshidabad district, three in Kolkata, apart from two houses in Kolkata and a sprawling farmhouse.
What has actually raised the ED eyebrows is the revelation from the documents that the doctor couple had purchased two immovable properties “without any proper approval from the state government authorities”. On top of it, ‘interestingly, a post facto approval was granted to Dr Sangeeta Ghosh to purchase the property by Dr Sandip Ghosh in the year 2021,” the ED said.
Those properties, it was prima facie suspected, were purchased out of proceeds of Ghosh’s vast network of the flourishing trade of spurious medicines and biomedical wastes. And some proof of all this is believed to have been submitted to the Supreme Court in the seal envelope. When asked, sources were evasive and declined to comment.
Obviously, questions are being asked in the corridors of power why a post facto approval was granted and at whose bidding was it done; why the state vigilance commission sat on complaints against the suspended principal and which ‘invisible hand’ continued to protect this man alleged to have kept on committing crime after crime on humanity.
Tilottama, the victim, some nurses were believed to have confided to the CBI, was cautioned several times by them not to press these issues (spurious medicines) with Ghosh; “but she refused to heed our advice,” the nurses were quoted as having revealed. There is no independent confirmation of the same though.
A combined team of CBI and ED is reportedly planning to vigorously quiz medical equipment vendor Biplab Singha and pharmacy shop owner Suman Hazra who are already under custody, for further details of the trail.
What's Your Reaction?
