The private trust allegedly hired underqualified doctors or foreign-trained doctors without registration to practise in India to run the ICU.
In 2018, when a local businessman, Goldy Sharma, lost a relative who was admitted to the ICU in MT Agarwal Hospital, he filed a query under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to get information about the ICU deaths.
Sharma found that 149 deaths were recorded at the hospital’s ICU from February 17 to November 22, 2018. However, he found it suspicious that for all patients the cause of death was recorded as heart attacks.
Sharma further found out that the private trust running the hospital ICU didn’t have trained doctors or those registered with the Maharashtra Medical Council.
Without a registration, a doctor cannot fill up death certificates.
Police had registered an FIR after Sharma lodged a private complaint before Mulund court which directed the police to file a case and a report. Two doctors and a manager were thereafter arrested in June.
On Sunday, Mulund police arrested the two trustees, Birendra Yadav and Deepak Jain, in Madhya Pradesh and brought them to Mumbai.
The police said the duo took a train from Kalyan to Madhya Pradesh after learning their pre-arrest bail applications were rejected.
Earlier in this case, police inspector Bhusan Daima and constable Ramesh Kalas were caught by the anti-corruption bureau for allegedly accepting an amount of Rs 2 lakh of a total Rs 11 lakh bribe they had demanded from one of the accused in July.
The two trustees along with the three previously arrested have been booked under Indian Penal Code sections 302 for murder, 307 for attempt to murder, 416 and 419 for cheating by impersonation, 465 for forgery, 426 for mischief and 471 for using a forged document as genuine, and sections of the Maharashtra Medical Practitioner Act, 1961.
After the police investigations began, the BMC decided to end all contracts with the Jeevan Jyot Trust, which operated other facilities in the civic body’s hospitals in public private partnerships.
