Bilaspur
The Chhattisgarh High Court has provided major relief to four doctors of Apollo Hospital, quashing the First Information Report (FIR) and the chargesheet filed against them in a seven-year-old case involving a patient’s death.
A Division Bench of Chief Justice Ramesh Sinha and Justice BD Guru allowed the petition, holding that criminal charges against the doctors were not justified.
The matter dates back to 2016, when a patient from Dayalband was admitted to Apollo Hospital in a critical condition on 25 December. The patient, identified as a young man, died the following day, 26 December, due to multiple organ failure.
The patient’s family subsequently filed a complaint at Sarkanda police station, alleging medical negligence. Police registered a case against the four doctors—Dr Sunil Kumar Kedia, Dr Devendra Singh, Dr Rajiv Lochan Bhanja, and Dr Manoj Kumar Rai—under sections 304A (causing death by negligence) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The doctors challenged the case in the High Court through senior advocate Sunil Otwani. They argued that the patient had been brought to the hospital in a grave state, and death resulted from his severe health condition, not medical error.
During the hearing, the court noted that the police initially sent the viscera for chemical analysis after the post-mortem, which did not detect any traces of sulphurous or other suspicious substances.
Crucially, the petition highlighted that a State Medical Board, comprising five medical specialists including a cardiologist, formed in 2023, submitted a report. The report explicitly stated that there was no negligence on the part of the doctors. The board concluded that the patient’s death was due to his serious health condition and multiple organ failure.
The High Court considered that despite the expert Medical Board’s clear findings, the police department relied on a separate report by a Medico-Legal expert to file the case. This latter report noted certain procedural shortcomings, such as not recording a pre-mortem statement and not preserving a rice tube, but failed to establish a direct link between these procedural deficiencies and the patient’s death.
In its ruling, the High Court clarified that, based on the findings of the expert Medical Board and other specialist reports, no criminal negligence was proven against the doctors. The Bench asserted that the continued existence of the FIR and the chargesheet were not tenable in law, setting aside the proceedings against the doctors.
