Woman's Body Kept In Hospital Ward For Hours In Rajasthan. Daughter Told She's Asleep

Community Health Centre staff waited for police to arrive from 15 km away, which took 6 hours, before shifting the body to the mortuary

A two-year-old girl kept pulling the sheet off her mother's body, while her brother, barely three months old, played on the same bed – both unaware that the mother, 20, was dead.

This was the scene at a patients' ward at a Community Health Centre at Nainwa town in Rajasthan's Tonk district, as the staff did not shift the body to the mortuary for six hours. They waited for police to show up from 15 kilometres away and complete some formalities.

The dead woman's mother kept asking the children not to “disturb” their mother, telling them she was asleep. But the two-year-old kept trying to wake her, crying out, “Maa, maa (mother)”, repeatedly.

The shift to the mortuary happened after the police showed up. It was not clear exactly what ailment the woman, Shabana, died of. The family, daily-wage labourers, refused to get the autopsy done, saying she had “a long running problem in her abdomen”. Police said she was severely anemic.