In a disturbing incident, a woman in Hyderabad, delivered a baby in an auto-rickshaw, outside the labour ward of the Gandhi Hospital on Thursday.
According to reports, the woman, a resident of Attaguda in Secunderabad was forced to deliver inside the vehicle as the hospital staff kept asking for money to bring her a stretcher and none of them came forward to help her.
Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Srinivas Yadav, a witness to the incident, said, "I happened to be at the hospital as I was visiting a friend. I saw the woman crying in pain. No doctors and medical staff came forward to look after the patient and the new-born baby boy. The medial attendants kept asking for money to take the woman on a stretcher."
The Times of India reported that the woman was already in labour, when she began the journey, and was later admitted to the hospital on 'humanitarian grounds'.
"Although her delivery was not under us as she had already delivered at the hospital gate, we took her inside the hospital later and we are taking care of the baby. The mother said that she did not start immediately for the hospital after getting labour pains. Looks like she could not understand that it was labour pain and she also got delayed on the way," Dr Shravan Kumar, the hospital superintendent told TOI.
Meanwhile, in another incident, relatives of a woman staged protest at the Government Maternity Hospital in Koti, after her newborn died due to complications post delivery.
The woman's family alleged that doctors refused to conduct a C-section operation, and claimed that it had to be a normal delivery.
“Following the uproar over C-section deaths, maternity hospitals have been reluctant to conduct surgeries. While they assumed that a normal delivery would be a safer option, it backfired in this case," a source told TOI.
In February this year, five women who underwent a C-section surgery at the Niloufer hospital in Hyderabad died within a span of 10 days.