The Warangal police said Monday they have arrested 18 people, including five gynaecologists and two Ayurveda doctors among others, after a covert operation against illegal gender determination and female foeticide in the district. On Monday, the anti-human trafficking unit and the police commissioner's task force raided several centres and hospitals to nab the accused. They have been booked under Section 315 (an act done with the intent to prevent a child from being born alive or to cause it to die after birth) of the Indian Penal Code. According to officials, among the five doctors who have been arrested, three were government doctors. The police have approached the government to cancel their licence to practice while they have been arrested and remanded in judicial custody. The police decoys laid a trap for them over the last two months and busted an organised network involving doctors, registered medical practitioners (RMPs), hospital staff and public relations officers, scanning centres, and technicians. The police department had also held a meeting with the officials of the medical and health department on March 18 in this regard to understand more. During the investigation, the police found out that over 100 abortions have been performed by the accused over a period of time. “We noticed a skewed sex ratio in many mandals, especially villages in the tribal-dominated areas such as Nekkonda, Narasampet, and even in parts of Jangaon. When we started probing, we found that some of the hospitals were doing this,” Warangal police Commissioner A V Ranganath told indianexpress.com. The practice, the police said, has been going on for many years, with a criminal case booked against a scanning centre once in a while. “It is being done only for fleecing money. If anyone goes to them, they just do scanning and say it is a girl. We found that they didn't want to lose the money from abortion and told the clients that it was a girl even if it was a boy,” said Commissioner Ranganath. While abortions were being conducted for anything between Rs 20,000 and Rs 30,000, scanning for gender confirmation cost about Rs 15,000. The police also came across instances when the cost escalated to Rs 1 lakh depending on the affluence of the client and the nature of the case. “Another problem is that their sex determination is also not accurate. They are mostly using China-made mobile scanners, and their accuracy is questionable. The technicians doing this are also not qualified. They have worked with some doctors or gynaecologists and learned to scan. Such abortions are rampant. It is an organised crime. RMPs find parties and bring them to hospital PROs and they take them to scan centres and back to the hospital for an abortion,” added Ranganath. The police also found that some nursing homes had hired Ayurveda doctors to perform the dilation and curettage (D&C) procedures. They have also seized three scanners and arrested a technician couple Vemula Praveen, and his wife Sandhyarani, who ran an illegal gender determination centre from a rented house at Venkateshwara colony in Gopalpur. Praveen had earlier worked as a technician at a centre and hatched a plan to make quick money. The other arrested people were identified as Dr Balne Pardhu, Dr Balne Poornima, Dr Balne Pradeep Reddy, Dr Moram Aravinda, Dr Moram Srinivas Murthy, and others. The police also named Lotus Hospital at Hanamkonda, Gayathri Hospital, Upender (Pardhu) Hospital at Nekkonda and Balaji multi-speciality hospital at Narsampet as some of the hospitals where illegal sex determination and illegal abortions were rampant.
