ays India should put pressure on Myanmar govt.

to resettle Rohingya refugees

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Friday said that there are various pending issues between
India and Bangladesh, and that they wanted to settle all of them in a friendly ambience.

Ms. Hasina and Prime Minister Narendra Modi participated in two back-to-back events at Visva Bharati
University in Santiniketan — the convocation of the university and the inauguration of the Bangladesh
Bhavana — and laid emphasis on the shared cultural heritage.

“We have sorted out many bilateral issues. There are still some pending ones but I don’t want to spoil
the beautiful occasion by referring to them. We want to settle all issues in a friendly ambience,” Ms.
Hasina said at the inauguration of Bangladesh Bhavana, a cultural complex with a museum narrating the
history of the 1971 Liberation War, on the campus of Visva Bharati.

ALSO READ

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has a word with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina
during the annual convocation of Visva-Bharati University in Birbhum on May 25, 2018.

Mamata-Hasina talks: Many ‘ifs’ around Teesta

Her comment was an obvious reference to the Teesta dispute.

Ms. Hasina also urged for “cooperation from all to put pressure” on the government of Myanmar so that
over one million Rohingya, who had taken shelter in Bangladesh, could return to their country. “We
want them [the Rohingya] to return to their country. We want the region to remain peaceful,” she said.

‘A rare example’

The Prime Minister of Bangladesh gave an emotional speech on how India stood by Bangladesh during
its liberation war of 1971 and then in 1975 when her father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and
other members of her family were assassinated.

Reflecting on the land boundary agreement which settled the enclave issue, she said it was a rare
example of border issues between two countries having been sorted out “amicably.”
Mr. Modi said the relations between the two countries were born out of “shared struggles of the past”
and both were facing common problems like climate change. “The kind of friendship between India and
Bangladesh, contributing to each other’s development, is an example which the other countries can
follow and learn from,” he said. Underlining the importance of “mutual cooperation,” he said both
countries “can learn from each other in areas of public policy and culture.”

ALSO READ

Business team working at the office using laptop and a smartphone

Sheikh Hasina urges India Inc. to invest in Bangaldesh

“The progress made by Bangladesh in the area of social sector, particularly in improving the lives of
people, is something we can take inspiration from,” he said. Mr. Modi spoke of increased cooperation in
areas like connectivity, space connectivity and power. None of the leaders said anything on the sharing
of river water.

Minister of Cultural Affairs of Bangladesh Asaduzzaman Noor told The Hindu on Friday that they are
optimistic about discussions on Teesta.

In her brief speech West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee quoted extensively from Rabindranath
and Kazi Nazrul Islam to say that the relationship with Bangladesh will “deepen” despite differences.

“Lot of water has flowed [regarding relationship] between the two countries and a lot will flow, but the
relationship between the two countries will flourish,” she said.

ALSO READ

On a bard’s turf: Narendra Modi, Sheikh Hasina and Mamata Banerjee at Visva-Bharati University in
Birbhum.

At Visva-Bharati, Modi talks up ties with Dhaka

Ms. Banerjee will meet Prime Minister Hasina in her central Kolkata hotel on Saturday evening. Ms.
Hasina is also expected to brief the press.
Shared heritage

Both the leaders spoke about the contribution of Rabindranth Tagore and how the poet is a shared
cultural icon between the two countries.

“He is as important to India as he is to Bangladesh,” Mr. Modi said, adding that Tagore is a “shared
heritage between the two countries which could not be divided by the British or even partition of the
country.”

The Prime Minister described the Nobel laureate as the first global citizen whose influence knew no
borders.

ALSO READ

Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives to attend Annual Convocation programme of Visva-Bharati
University in Birbhum on Friday.

India, Bangladesh can learn from each other in public policy and culture, says Modi

Just as the Government of Bangladesh has constructed Bangladesh Bhawan at Visva Bharati, Mr. Modi
said the Government of India has taken up the task of renovating Kuthi Bari in Kustia district of
Bangladesh.

Both Mr. Modi and Ms. Hasina made repeated references to the fact that the national anthem of both
the countries is by Tagore.

Ms. Hasina said most of the poems written by Tagore were during his stay in Bangladesh and thus their
claim on the poet can be no less than India’s.

While recounting how fond her father was of the poems by Gurudev, Ms. Hasina announced setting up
of two new universities named after Rabindranath Tagore, one at Shahajpur and the other at Kustia,
both the places where the Tagore family managed large zamindari estates.
Post a Comment

Receive the best of The Hindu delivered to your inbox everyday!

ENTER YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

GO

More In

NationalIndia-Bangladesh

SPONSORED STORIES

Donald Trump had this to say about Meghan Markle after actress called him ‘misogynistic’Donald
Trump had this to say about Meghan Markle after actress called him ‘misogynistic’

Donald Trump had this to say about Meghan Markle after actress called him ‘misogynistic’

The Express

If You Want To Be Successful, Learn This One Skill

If You Want To Be Successful, Learn This One Skill

getAbstract Life!

Enjoy Life After Retirement

Enjoy Life After Retirement

Fisher Investments

Recommended by

Comments will be moderated by The Hindu editorial team.

Comments that are abusive, personal, incendiary or irrelevant cannot be published.

Please write complete sentences. Do not type comments in all capital letters, or in all lower case letters,
or using abbreviated text. (example: u cannot substitute for you, d is not 'the', n is not 'and').

We may remove hyperlinks within comments.

Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name, to avoid rejection.

Close X

Trending in National
Images of the Model Code of Conduct Violation Reporting App made available in Bengaluru. EC to
launch app to help voters share malpractice proof

It allows for sharing of photos and audio and video clips

DEVESH K. PANDEY

Nipah toll now 11; 2 persons critical

AIIMS team reaches Kerala

STAFF REPORTER

Top Picks in The Hindu todayThe Pakistan Rangers called up its counterpart, Border Security Force (BSF),
to seek a halt to the firing Three families, who each lost a child in what they consider to be cases of
malpractice, have started a movement to seek strict regulation of private hospitals. Vidya Krishnan
reports

On July 30, 2011, at 3.26 p.m., 10-year-old Yash Arora was declared dead at Gurugram’s Medanta, the
Medicity, one of India’s leading super-speciality hospitals. Yash had gone through six readmissions, two
liver transplants, and numerous bouts of infections over nine months. The bill for his treatment
amounted to ₹45 lakh.

The Aroras are from Rudrapur, a small town in Uttarakhand. They had brought their son to the hospital
for liver treatment in March 2010. Yash’s father, Pankaj Arora, 42, claims that the doctors advised a liver
transplant on the assumption that the patient’s family could afford it. “As soon as they discovered that
we couldn’t, they started treating the patient differently,” he says. After Yash’s first liver transplant on
April 1, 2011, Arora says the boy was discharged with an infection that caused the transplant to fail.

As a result, Yash had to be readmitted in a few days, on April 5. “He had his second liver transplant on
April 20, after which the hospital put him in a ‘shared room’ with a patient suffering from drug-resistant
tuberculosis,” says Arora. “This led to a lung infection,” adds his lawyer Piyush Chabra. According to
Arora, the hospital put Yash in a ‘shared room’ only because they realised that the family could not
afford the isolation ward, which is mandatory for immunocompromised patients who have received new
organs.

A cure for medical malpractice

Seeking closure

The Aroras were convinced that Yash was a victim of medical malpractice. But for three years they
couldn’t do anything more than grieve for their only child. “I found the emotional strength to look at
legal options only after the birth of my second child in 2014,” Arora says. Seeking closure, the family
filed a Right to Information application with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on May
14, 2015. Arora’s first question was regarding the isolation protocol for liver transplant patients. The
answer from AIIMS confirmed the family’s worst suspicion: “Absolute isolation is required.”

In response to a question about the level of care to be given to immunocompromised patients, AIIMS
listed several precautions to be followed that included providing a separate room in the isolation ward
for the patient; masks, gloves and eye protection for those entering the room; disinfecting medical
instruments; and incinerating used needles and syringes.

The patient’s medical records and discharge certificate show that the doctors at Medanta initiated
treatment for drug-resistant TB for Yash on July 6, 2011. Arora claims that the hospital did this without
informing the family. “After my son died, I googled ‘ATT’. Only then did I realise that they had been
treating him for TB. Yash caught TB only because the hospital put him in a room with a TB patient. This
was a clear and absolute violation of medical protocol. This was much more than negligence. This was a
death sentence,” says Arora.

Seven years after his son’s death, Arora’s life revolves around documents — dozens of files of medical
records, paperwork tracking legal proceedings, newspaper clippings on medical malpractice, and
treatment protocols set by the government. Despite his meticulous data-gathering, there hasn’t been
much progress on the legal front.

Arora believes that the police never made a serious attempt to investigate the charges of medical
negligence that he had made in his FIR against the hospital. Registering the FIR wasn’t easy either. It was
only after directions from a district court that the police obliged. Subsequently, a medical board at the
Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, examined the medical records
and dismissed the case without taking testimonies from the family. The family has appealed against the
medical board’s decision in the Gurugram Sessions Court, where the case is currently pending.

Cases in the spotlight

Arora is not the only parent or family member running from pillar to post. In Delhi, a few other families
have found that they share similar stories of grief and loss, which they attribute to medical malpractice,
and which have drawn them together to form a small movement against medical malpractice in India.

Two such cases grabbed the headlines last year. During the dengue season (July to mid-September) in
2017, a girl named Adya Singh and a boy named Shaurya Parmar, both seven years old and unrelated,
died in two state-of-the-art multi-specialty private hospitals: Fortis Memorial Research Institute in
Gurugram and Medanta, respectively. Adya and Shaurya died of dengue.

Adya’s family was handed a ₹16 lakh bill by Fortis and Shaurya’s family was given a bill of ₹15 lakh. The
National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) analysed the medical bills and found that the hospital
had markup drugs and consumables from 200% to 1,700% in some cases. Fortis denied allegations of
overcharging. To a specific query posed by The Hindu on the justification for this markup, Fortis handed
out seven press releases in response. It maintained that the profit margins are not illegal as they do not
violate the Drug Price Control Orders. The hospital said: “It should be noted that our end price to the
patient is very much in line with what other private hospitals in India charge. Looking at individual prices
of any single item as a standalone takes the margin/ profit topic out of context.” It added: “All
consumables are transparently reflected in records and charged as per actuals. A total of 750 pairs of
gloves and 600 syringes during a 15-day stay is justifiable and acceptable when the patient is in an ICU
setting.”

Adya’s father, Jayant Singh, and Shaurya’s father, Gopendra Parmar, reached out to the media in
desperation. When they both made an appearance on television, Arora knew he had to meet them.
“When I saw Jayant Singh and Gopendra Parmar on TV, I immediately realised that I could not let them
make the mistakes that I did, such as wasting crucial time registering FIRs and retrieving medical
records. We got in touch soon after that, and have been speaking to each other almost every day. My
only goal now is to make sure that what happened to me should never happen to another family,” says
Arora.

Over the last seven months, the conversations between the families has acquired a sense of purpose
and urgency. Following Adya’s death in October last year, Singh created a Facebook page called Fight
Against Healthcare Corruption. It has quickly become a platform where about 6,000 people across the
country have connected with him with their own stories. “Everyone who got in touch has faced similar
problems. They all want to know how my case got highlighted by the media, and what they should do.
They want to join the fight for justice,” says Singh. These families are now demanding that an
independent body be set up, with civil society representatives, to investigate cases of medical
malpractice.

Amid mounting pressure from the affected families and the attendant media glare, Adya’s death led to
the filing of a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court. The PIL demands the regulation of
India’s unregulated private health sector, from neighbourhood clinics to corporate hospitals, under
Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. On March 23, in
response to the PIL, the apex court sent notices to the Medical Council of India (MCI), the Union Health
Ministry, Haryana’s health department, the NPPA, and doctors at Fortis hospital. The PIL sought to turn
the spotlight on “a larger systematic and structured loot of desperate patients... which is engineered by
and between pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic labs, doctors and ultimately corporate hospitals.”
Singh has high hopes from the PIL. “This is not about my daughter any more. It’s no longer just a
personal battle. The experience of most people attests to the fact that the police, the medical councils,
and the government health departments work against the patients. The entire system is fighting against
patients and working for pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and private hospitals instead
of regulating them,” he says.

Regulate the private health sectorand shelling along the International Border in Jammu.

A commander of Pakistan Rangers phoned a BSF officer on Saturday night and urged that Pakistan’s
forward posts not be targeted as the incessant firing was causing damage to civilians.

The BSF released a 19-second thermal-imaging footage that showed the destruction of a Pakistani post
across the border. A BSF officer refused to reveal the location, but said it was destroyed in the past few
days. “Our officer told Pakistan Rangers that we were only responding to the unprovoked firing from
across the border. We did not fire first,” he said.

Two BSF soldiers were killed in the latest round of unprovoked firing in Jammu last week. The BSF said
the current spell of cross-border firing was expected as the harvest season was over. A senior official
said this was the “third spell” of heavy firing from across the border this year; the first two occurred in
January. The firing also coincided with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the State on Saturday.

India is not going to allow its defence engagement with Russia to be dictated by any other country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday voiced the hope his talks with President Vladimir Putin would
further strengthen the “special and privileged” strategic partnership between India and Russia.

In a series of tweets — in Russian and then in English — on the eve of his visit to Russia, Mr. Modi said
he looked forward to his meeting with Mr. Putin.

“Greetings to the friendly people of Russia. I look forward to my visit to Sochi tomorrow and my meeting
with President Putin. It is always a pleasure to meet him,” Mr. Modi tweeted.

During their informal summit in the Russian city of Sochi on Monday, the two leaders will primarily focus
on global and regional issues, including the impact of the U.S. decision to withdraw from a nuclear deal
with Iran.

“Am confident the talks with President Putin will further strengthen the Special and Privileged Strategic
Partnership between India and Russia,” Mr. Modi said in another tweet.

Official sources said the two leaders would meet for 4-6 hours for the “agendaless” talks where
deliberations on bilateral issues were likely to be limited.

They said the issues on the table might include the economic impact on India and Russia in the wake of
the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the situation in Afghanistan and Syria, the threat of terrorism
and matters relating to the upcoming SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) and BRICS summits.
The sources said the possible impact of the US sanctions against Russia under the Countering America’s
Adversaries through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) on Indo-Russia defence cooperation may also figure during
the talks between Modi and Putin.

India is not going to allow its defence engagement with Russia to be dictated by any other country, the
sources said, adding New Delhi has been lobbying with the Trump administration on the issue.

The aim of the informal summit is to use the friendship and trust between the two countries to create
convergence on key global and regional issues, the sources said.

The two leaders may also deliberate on extending the Indo-Russia civil nuclear cooperation to third
countries, possible areas for cooperation for the International North-South Transport Corridor project,
India’s engagement with the five-nation Eurasian Economic Union and the situation in the Korean
peninsula.

A Mumbai-based jeweller who created a hijack scare on board a Jet Airways flight in October last year
has become the first person to be put on the ‘National No Fly List’, eight months after it was unveiled.

Incidentally, he was also the first to be booked under the stringent Anti-Hijacking Act, which has
replaced the vintage law of 1982.

Birju Kishore Salla (37) was arrested in October following the emergency landing made by the Mumbai-
Delhi Jet Airways plane at the Ahmedabad airport. The pilot was alerted about a note that mentioned
that there were hijackers and a bomb in the cargo area.

The then Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju had advised airlines to put him on the no-fly list, in
addition to other statutory criminal action.

Under the revised Civil Aviation Requirement (CAR), a passenger can be considered to be placed under
three categories of unruly behaviour, with category three bearing the harshest punishment. Salla has
been placed under the third category.

It says that if a passenger’s behaviour is considered life threatening, like affecting the safety of the
aircraft, he/she can be banned for up to two years.

Salla is a multi-millionaire jeweller with an office in the Zaveri Bazar area of Mumbai. He owns a flat in a
posh locality of the metropolis.

All for love

He had confessed to preparing the note, hoping the threat could make Jet Airways close operations in
Delhi. He wanted his girlfriend, who works for Jet in Delhi, to return to Mumbai.

According to the crime branch, the note was a printed note in Urdu and English, asking that the plane be
flown straight to POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir). It ended with the words, “Allah is Great”. The
reference to POK made investigators suspicious because Pakistan-based terrorists call the area ‘Azad
Kashmir’

According to the DGCA, it is the responsibility of Jet Airways now to inform other airlines about the
grounding of this particular passenger under the CAR. The DGCA will continue to maintain database of
such passengers.