Braving all odds, Udhampur woman who lost son to spurious syrup delivers baby

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, November 20

Udhampur-based Marufa Begum and her husband Jafar Din have just completed a yearlong journey from despair to hope. After losing their only son to spurious cough syrup manufactured by Himachal-based Digital Vision in December 2020, the nomad couple had given up all hope in life until Marufa, 21, got pregnant again.

But even this pregnancy was nearly impossible to sustain as doctors at the local Ramnagar hospital in Udhampur told the distraught parents that her haemoglobin level was dangerously low and not enough to carry her pregnancy.

“She had only 3-gram haemoglobin with the Ramnagar hospital in no position to either admit her or top up her blood which was the rarest of groups — O negative. So we arranged to first shift her to Jammu and then take it from there,” says Jammu-based social activist Sukesh Khajuria, who brought local networks together to arrange blood, enabling her safely deliver last Friday at Sri Maharaja Gulab Singh Hospital, Jammu.

“The blood was donated by Jafar Din’s brother and another relative, apart from private donors we managed to mobilise,” Khajuria told The Tribune today.

It was on Khajuria’s petition earlier that the National Human Rights Commission ordered monetary compensation for families of 12 infants who died in Udhampur between December 2019 and January 2020 after consuming the contaminated cough syrup.

Each of the 12 families received Rs 3 lakh, an amount the Supreme Court recently upheld, dismissing a special leave petition of the J&K administration, challenging the compensation award. The National Human Rights Commission had ordered compensation holding the J&K drugs authority guilty of failing to check contaminated cough syrup from entering the supply chains in Udhampur.

Challan in the deaths of 12 infants is however yet to be filed with the special investigation team, constituted for the purpose in Udhampur, continuing to drag its feet. The syrup in question was found laced with the lethal diethylene glycol, which was also detected in the syrups made by Sonepat-based Maidan Pharma, allegedly linked to the death of over 66 Gambian children.

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