INDIA. Mumbai: A general physician, who was running a pile clinic and assuring the patients guaranteed treatment and carrying out surgeries unauthorisedly, has been arrested and remanded to judicial custody till July 09, 2021.
A 30-year-old Dr. Saidu Mukesh Kota has been running “Dr. S Gopal Rao’s Piles and ANO-Rectal Centre ” located at Dadar East in Central Mumbai for the last few years. As per the information on the centre’s website, the clinic was set up by his father Dr. S Gopal Rao several years back. After his retirement in 1989, Dr Kota took over and has been running it since then.
He has also been releasing advertisements claiming guaranteed results. In his web advertisement, he claimed that it was the first clinic in Mumbai to introduce non-operative and no surgical treatment for piles, fissures, fistula. Dr. Kota, who has been claiming to have completed MBBS in 2017 from a university in Andhra Pradesh, was also collecting heavy fees from the patients.
He came into trouble when the health of a Taxi driver Khaliluddin Khateeb (43) deteriorated after he carried out a “surgery” on him. After an initial check-up on February 06, 2021, Dr. Kota performed surgery on Khateeb on February 21, 2021. For the surgery, he was made to fill a consent form and was charged Rs 25,000/- for the surgery.
The surgery was performed at 3 pm on that day and the patient was discharged after 4 hours. However, when he reached home, his wound began bleeding profusely. As such his wife took him to the BMC run KEM Hospital. During the treatment at KEM, attending doctors realized that because of the negligence of Dr. Kota, the bleeding had begun and his condition deteriorated. After recovering a little bit at KEM, Khateeb complained (FIR No. 410/2021) at Matunga police station on March 05, 2021.
The Matunga Police referred the matter to the Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) and the state government-run Sir J J Hospital. The J J Hospital Expert Committee in its report on June 21, 2021, certified that there was negligence on the part of Dr. Kota. The MMC also stated that no MBBS doctor can perform surgery without having a Master in Surgery degree.
As such Dr. Kota was arrested and was sent to judicial custody till June 27 since his bail application (No,1114/2021) was rejected. The custody was again extended till July 09, by the Metropolitan Magistrate Shailesh A Bafna of the 30 th Metropolitan Magistrate court, Kurla. The magistrate noted that although the consent of the patient was taken before surgery, the nature of surgery was not mentioned. Besides, it was not mentioned who was the anesthetist.
Subsequently, the information obtained through RTI, by the social worker Mahesh (Bala) Vengurlekar revealed that the accused Dr. Kota earned lakhs of rupees by carrying out over 1000 unauthorized such surgeries in the last three years. He had no degree of Master of Surgery and as such he was not eligible to carry out surgeries.
Further, shocking information was that an FIR (No 126/19) was also lodged against Dr. Kota at Koparkhairane Police Station in Navi Mumbai, on charges of outraging the modesty of a woman, sexually harassing her, beating her, and threatening her with dire consequences two years back. He was out on bail in that case and the matter is still pending in court, Vengurlekar said.
Vengurlekar also blamed the officers of the BMC’s health department at F North ward for overlooking the matter because they could have carried out the check at Dr. Kota’s clinic earlier. They shielded Dr. Kota he alleged.
In the meanwhile, MMC vide its letter dated July 02, has called for an explanation from Dr. Kota, under clause (b) of subsection 1 of section 22 of the Maharashtra Medical Council Act 1965. Senior Police Inspector Mansion Bobde and Police Inspector Amol Sawant of Matunga Police are making further investigations into the case.
