New Delhi: A bench comprising Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice Y. Chandrachud has granted bail to Dr Rajiv Mishra, former principal of BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur.
At least 24 children died between August 10 and 13, 2017 at the state-run BRD Medical College, Gorakhpur, when liquid oxygen supply ran out. The hospital ran out of supply because lakhs of rupees of dues had not been paid to the private supplier. The money was not paid as it had not been cleared by the government of Uttar Pradesh.
Rajiv Mishra was accused of sitting over the issue of payments to the vendor supplying oxygen to the hospital. He had been in jail for ten months after his bail was denied. His wife, Purnima Shukla, a homeopath who was also working at the hospital, is still in jail. Mishra had been suffering from a number of health ailments before and during his time in jail.
He is accused of corruption with regards to payments for oxygen at the medical college and was also charged under Section 308 of the Indian Penal Code, which pertains to the ‘attempt to commit culpable homicide.’ Neither he nor any of the other eight accused have actually been charged with the deaths of the children in last August. The government of Uttar Pradesh has also maintained that it was not the lack of oxygen which caused the deaths of the children in Gorakhpur. The state government also says that there was only an interruption of oxygen supply and not a shortage.
Asking the Supreme Court for bail
In the 11 months following the tragedy, the trial has not actually begun, and for a number of the accused in this case, bail is proving impossible.
Four out of the nine accused have now got bail, but it took seven to ten months for them to get it. Three of them had to finally approach the Supreme Court for this. The rest do not have the wherewithal to engage a Supreme Court lawyer or travel to New Delhi for the case.
Some of them have received rejections at the lower courts and are unsure of how to proceed upwards. They are also facing repeated cancelled bail-hearings at the Allahabad high court. They can approach the Supreme Court for bail after the high court rejects it, or they could approach the Supreme Court for a direction to the high court to hear their bail matter.
Maneesh Bhandari, the owner of the private oxygen company, was the first to receive bail and he received it from the Supreme Court as well. So did Kafeel Khan, the prominent doctor from UP, who had attempted to gather oxygen cylinders from various nearby places when the crisis hit the hospital.
Bhandari and Mishra both were represented by former attorney general of India, Mukul Rohatgi, in the Supreme Court.
One of the other accused, Satish Kumar, an anaesthesiologist, received his bail from the Allahabad high court.