The injustice of a cataract surgery 

Cataract surgery at Kolkata hospital leaves patients blind, sparking outrage and demands for justice and compensation.

Like most mothers, Rezwana Parveen, 60, was excited for her daughter’s wedding later this year. In preparation, she decided to get cataract surgery in her right eye at Kolkata’s Garden Reach State General Hospital (GRSGH) in July.

Parveen made the journey from Asansol, about 200 kilometres from Kolkata at GRSGH, on Friday, June 28. “The next day I could not see anything. So, I went back to the hospital, and the doctors gave me eye drops and sent me home,” she says, perched on Bed 185 in the dilapidated female ward of the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology (RIO) about a week after her cataract surgery.

“The day after, the doctors at GRSGH called us in a panic and asked us to come to Kolkata’s Medical College immediately,” she recalled, as her daughters prepped her for discharge. “They said my eye had been infected.”

As per hospital estimates, Parveen is one of at least 20 who had undergone cataract surgery at the West Bengal government-run GRSGH between June 26 and June 29 this year, who were left partially or completely blind in the operated eye, after alleged post-surgical infections.

Between these days, 40 people had surgeries, a GRSGH doctor says. The Medical Superintendent of GRSGH, Koushik Ray, confirmed that the hospital authorities had contacted all the patients after they detected an infection in one of them during their first post-surgical follow-up. “Eventually, infections were detected in 20 patients, and for further treatment, they were sent to RIO, the eye department in Medical College, Kolkata,” he says.

On the day of her discharge, Parveen was bereft. “They are sending me home, but I still cannot see anything. The doctors here told me that I might never be able to see with this eye,” she said. By then she had undergone three more procedures in her affected eye at RIO.

“I opted for this surgery to better my life, but it made everything worse. I wish I had never done it,” she says, a tear trickling down from behind her dark glasses. A patient on the bed opposite says, “Don’t cry, your eye will get worse.”