How justice was denied to Jammu children killed five years ago by deadly cough syrup

It was a harsh winter morning in October 2019 in a Jammu village, when Makhno Devi took her 11-year-old son, Rutav, to the nearest sub-district hospital.

For three days, Rutav had stopped urinating, his body temperature had risen and he was refusing to eat.

But doctors at the hospital in Ramnagar town struggled to treat the boy. By evening, they referred him to the district hospital in Udhampur and gave Makhno an ambulance.

Udhampur was 36 km away, a ride over hilly terrain. Rutav died on the way.

Thirty-eight-year-old Makhno, who grows maize on a small farmland in Kirmoo village, said that the ambulance driver left the family on the road with the body. For the next three months, no health team visited her to ask about Rutav’s death.

Then in February 2020, she was told that her son’s death had been caused by a contaminated cough syrup she had forced him to gulp down for three days, a syrup she had bought off the counter from a chemist in Ramnagar.

Thirteen more children died in Jammu’s Ramnagar district after Rutav – all of them had consumed Coldbest-PC cough syrup. Six who survived were left with permanent disabilities.

The syrup had been manufactured 500 km away in Himachal Pradesh’s Sirmaur district by pharmaceutical company...

Read more