Opposition slams government over fresh probe

BHUBANESWARVSSBurlaHealth minister Damodar Rout said the four teams, each comprising two additional directors, will find out shortcomings at any level by interacting with the affected parents at their native places. The teams would probe whether these newborn babies received proper care after their delivery, if there was any delay in their referral and were the mothers covered under Mamata scheme.Pradeep Acharya and Dinabandhu Sahoo would visit Sundargarh and Sambalpur while Rajarini Hajra and R N Panda would probe the matter in Balangir, the government notification said. The two-member team of Pramod Pradhan and Aditya Mohapatra has been assigned Sonepur and Boudh while Manorama Mishra and Sitaram Behera would conduct an inquiry in Bargarh. Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee president Jayadev Jena said the fresh probe is an afterthought of the government after it failed to convince the angry parents with a hurried clean chit to the Burla hospital by the inquiry team led by director of medical education and training Sunamali Bag. "The government ordered the fresh inquiry to quell public protest. If the government was serious to bring out the truth, it would have instituted similar inquiry on the day the deaths came to light. It is another attempt to hush up the issue," Jena said. BJP spokesperson Suresh Pujari said the cause of deaths will never be known as no postmortem was conducted. "This is the second attempt by the government to bail out the culprits. These four groups comprise peers of the same doctors whose roles are under scanner. The government could have at least asked AIIMS Bhubaneswar or an independent agency to do the job," he said.Congress spokesperson Narasingha Mishra said by ordering a fresh probe the government admitted that it is at fault. "If the doctors at VSS are not guilty, as mentioned in the first inquiry report, then the state government has failed to implement the Centre-sponsored Janani Suraksha Yojna and its own Mamata scheme leading to high malnutrition deaths. The second probe was unnecessary as government's failure has already been established from the newborns' low-birth weight," said Mishra