Fire at unlicensed Delhi hospital kills seven babies

Anger is mounting in India towards the owners and operators of an unlicensed children's hospital that burned down in Delhi over the weekend, killing seven newborn babies and leaving families struggling to identify their remains.

- NAMITA SINGH

Some of the babies killed in the fire were so young that they had not even been named yet, and families of the victims told The

Independent that they had no way of telling the victims apart, with any identifying documentation also destroyed in the blaze.

Police told The Independent that the fire likely started with an electrical short-circuit before rapidly spreading after several oxygen cylinders exploded. The chief doctor and owner of the Baby Care New Born Child Hospital, which did not have an active fire safety licence, fire extinguishers or a fire escape, have been arrested.

Most of the victims’ remains were taken to the city’s Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, where The Independent met the family of 15-day-old Ruhi.

She had only a mild fever when she was admitted to the private hospital, and the family were told she should be kept under observation for 48 hours, her aunt Vineeta Kumari said. The morning she was due to be discharged, Ruhi’s family woke up to the news that a fire had gutted the hospital and killed seven babies.

It took Ruhi’s family the whole of Sunday to confirm that their child was among the casualties. “We read about the fire in the newspaper,” said Ms Kumari, who said the family were yet to receive her niece’s remains more than 24 hours later. “They are doing her post-mortem.

“We ran from hospital to police station to the neonatal centre where the survivors had been taken to find out about our baby. But all the paperwork was burnt and there was no way to identify her as the body parts were largely turned to ash,” she said. “None of the afflicted families were informed by the hospital. We all learnt it through the media or secondary sources.”