Gorakhpur hospital tragedy: UP government suspends Principal of BRD Medical College

The Uttar Pradesh government on Saturday suspended the Principal of the BRD Medical College in Gorakhpur for the deaths of over 60 children. [caption id=“attachment_3923489” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image .PTI[/caption] Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s office said, quoting Health Minister Sidharth Nath Singh, that the principal has been suspended with immediate effect for negligence. Earlier, Adityanath dispatched Singh and Medical Education Minister Ashutosh Tandon to the tragedy-struck town with instructions to “spare none for the tragedy”. Sixty-three children have lost their lives due to encephalitis and reported lack of oxygen supply at the BRD Medical college in five days, of whom many were infants, and 30 of the deaths were reported in the last 48 hours. The sequence of events that led to the massacre of 60 children in Gorakhpur’s Baba Raghav Das Medical College since 7 August is a damning indictment of the government machinery. First, it failed to pay the contractor who supplied liquid oxygen to the hospital, running up arrears in excess of over Rs 68 lakh, even when, as the supplier argued, the terms and conditions of the supply agreement said the pending amount would not exceed Rs 10 lakh. Follow the liveblog here