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India's Chhattisgarh state chief medical officer Dr SK Mandal revealed today that investigators are trying to determine whether 13 women who died following sterilisation procedures were given tainted medicines.
The doctor who operated on them, RK Gupta, was arrested on Wednesday evening after going into hiding following the operations on Saturday.
He was charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison.
He insisted that he had done nothing wrong even though he admitted performing up to 10 times more surgeries a day than allowed.
Dr Gupta denied responsibility for the deaths and blamed medication given to the women after surgery
A total of 83 women had the operations as part of a free government-run mass sterilisation campaign.
They were sent home on Saturday evening, but dozens became ill and were rushed in ambulances to private hospitals in Bilaspur.
"I am not guilty. I have been performing surgeries for a long time and there has never been any problem," said Dr Gupta.
"I have a history of completing up to 200-300 surgeries in one day. There are no written guidelines, but what we have been told verbally is that we shouldn't perform more than 30 operations in a day."
He said that the patients had begun vomiting and complaining of dizziness and weakness after being given medication following the operations.
Dr Mandal said at least 13 women had died and dozens more were in hospital, including at least 16 fighting for their lives.
Dr Gupta's completion of 83 procedures in six hours was a clear breach of government protocol, which prohibits surgeons from performing more than 30 sterilisations in a day, Dr Mandal said.
Medical experts blame the deaths on a lack of medical oversight and on sterilisation targets set by central government as part of its efforts to stabilise the population.
New Delhi claims to have stopped setting targets for sterilising women in the 1990s, but doctors and campaigners such as the All India Democratic Women's Association have alleged for years that the practice continues, leading to coercion in rural areas.
