By Matters India Reporter
New Delhi: The Supreme Court of India has granted anticipatory bail to three persons, including to two elderly nuns, in a medico-legal case.
The apex court on April 13 ordered the Madhya Pradesh police not to arrest Sisters Herman Joseph and Loraine Thayil and Sabeeha Ansari until May 10, the next hearing of the case.
The three have been serving Pushp Kalyan Hospital managed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery at Sehore town, some 40 km southwest of Bhopal, the capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
They were accused of medical negligence after Prateeksha Sharma, wife of a Bharatiya Janata Party leader, died during her delivery in the hospital on December 10, 2020.
The supreme order came on an appeal filed the three against the rejection of their anticipatory bail application by the Madhya Pradesh High Court.
Sister Joseph, an 84-year-old gynecologist, has conducted 4,981 normal delivery and 1,577 Cesarean cases during her 51 years of experience in the medical profession. Sister Thayil is a 72-year-old anesthetist and Ansari holds a degree in Bachelor of Unani Medicine and Surgery.
The First Information Report against the three was registered at the Astha police station on January 7 and the police and the local authorities faced huge political pressure to implicate the hospital management, Jose Abraham, a lawyer who appeared for the three in the Supreme Court, told Matters India.
The nuns and Ansari sought anticipatory bail as the police planned to issue arrest warrants against them after canceling the hospital’s license.
While granting the bail, the Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Uday Umesh Lalit, K M Joseph and Indira Banerjee asked the three to cooperate with the investigation into the case. The court asked them to appear in the police station at 11 am on April 15 and other dates that the investigating officer will fix.
But at the same time they wanted the district administration to restore the license of the Catholic hospital the only healthcare facility functioning properly in the area, reports naiduniya.com, a Hindu news portal.
In a memorandum addressed to district collector, they pointed out that the hospital was the only facility that catered to the victims of snake and scorpion bites from several villages in Sehore district. Such victims have been left without medical help since the Church hospital’s closure in January, they added.
The local civil hospital “looks big” but has neither a gynecologist nor a sonography machine. It always suffers from staff shortage and its lift never functions. “The condition of the government hospital is miserable,” the memorandum said.