Raped brutally, a five-year-old child had to move from one hospital to another, till she reached one that conducted the five-hour surgery she needed to survive. The family says both hospitals did not have the facilities.
The child was abducted and raped, allegedly by one Sharma Yadav, from a function she was attending. The family, which had informed the police, finally found her in Gurgaon's civil hospital, where she had been admitted.
But the civil hospital wasn't equipped to handle the injuries, and referred her to the government-run Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi. En route, the family visited a private hospital, Max Healthcare.
Private hospitals cannot turn away rape survivors, according to a 2013 order of the Delhi high court.
In a statement, Max Healthcare said it had stabilised the child and since senior clinicians were "not available at that point," had offered to take her to its tertiary care hospital in Saket.
"In rape cases examination can be done only once, to collect evidence, the family preferred to go to Safdarjung (which was initially recommended to them) as the patient was now stable," the statement said.
"She can neither sit nor do anything else. She is in a lot of pain. The person who did this, he deserves nothing short of death," the child's father told NDTV.
But from her hospital bed, the girl has identified her assailant through a photograph.
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