BHAWANIPATNA/BHUBANESWAR: In a damning revelation about the insensitivity meted out by the district headquarters hospital (DHH) staff as well as the administration, Dana Majhi has alleged that a male attendant asked him to make his own arrangement when he approached him for help to shift his wife’s dead body late on August 23 night.
While not paying attention to his fervent appeals for help in the dead of the night, the hospital staff left him to fend for himself. Unable to afford an ambulance on his own and no support coming his way, he picked up his wife Agang Majhi’s body on his shoulders during the small hours of Wednesday. With his minor daughter, Dana, he began the walk to Shagada, about 10 km from Bhawanipatna.
Two days after his plight grabbed international headlines, the tribal man’s ordeal has not ended yet as he was allegedly reprimanded during investigation of the matter. In a video recorded by Congress leader Bhakta Charan Das, Dana said he was brought to Bhawanipatna in an official vehicle for inquiry on Friday when he was performing last rites of his wife. There, the officials reprimanded him for taking away the body without informing hospital staff.
Dana alleged that District Collector D Brundha asked him whether he had killed his wife. “She asked what problems I encountered in the hospital. When I said I took my wife from the hospital after she died, the Collector asked me whether I had killed my wife,” Dana told the Congress team which visited his village Melghara, about 60 km from Bhawanipatna, under Thuamul Rampur block.
Dana said he was called by officials of the district administration on Friday to give details about the incident and the reasons that prompted him to carry his wife’s body on his shoulders to his village.
Collector Brundha, however, has refuted Dana’s allegations. “I just asked him about the problems he faced in the hospital. The sub-collector has inquired about the incident based on which we have already taken action,” she said.
Investigation has revealed that the DHH at Bhawanipatna already has provision of a carrier to transport dead bodies but still Dana was deprived of the facility and had to go through a heart-breaking journey.
According to the Collector, the dead body carrier was used at least 36 times in July but in the wee hours of August 24, when Dana’s wife died, the staff nurse was not in the ward while the male attendant did not respond. The security guard at the hospital gate was not in his position either, she said.
The Collector said Dana should have intimated the male ward attendant or the security but he left the hospital without informing anyone. She, however, said the staff nurse and male attendant have already been disengaged from service and security agency changed.
“The staff nurse could have informed higher authorities or filed a missing report in the police station after she found the patient missing which she did not. This was negligence on her part,” she said.