LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Monday demanded a probe by a sitting Supreme Court or High Court judge into deaths of children at Gorakhpur Medical College.
Blood tests conducted on 1,800 children admitted in the hospital between January and October last year showed that they were suffering from encephalitis, but the government admitted only 500 such cases by "tweaking the records", he told reporters here.
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He alleged that acting at the behest of the government, the doctors there described illness of the children as acute fever and claimed that around 1,500 children had died there between January and October last year.
Yadav demanded that a team of doctors headed by a sitting Supreme Court of High Court judge be set up to probe the deaths.
The former chief minister said that when his father Mulayam Singh Yadav was in power, the then SP government used to pay compensation to the next of kin of the victim.
The SP government doubled the amount when the party returned to power in 2012, but the present government has stopped it, he added.