In yet another cases of suspected medical negligence, a pregnant woman lost her newborn baby whom she delivered in a moving vehicle on way to a hospital. The incident took place in the remote Kupwara’s Kalaroos where a pregnant woman had arrived on Saturday, April 13, at a public health centre with complaint of labour pain. According to reports, the woman was examined by the doctors there who referred her to Kupwara sub-district hospital. Shockingly, according to the family, the victim was denied an ambulance by the doctors at the health centre and her husband had to hire a private taxi to take his wife to Kupwara. It seems that crucial time may have been lost while the husband was searching for a private taxi and by the time it was arranged, it was late already. While the family was yet to reach the hospital, the women delivered the baby in the moving car midway and the baby died. This is sheer negligence on part of doctors to have denied a basic facility to the woman. There are several standing instructions as well as schemes under which a government-run health facility anywhere in the country has to provide for bringing a pregnant woman in labour to the hospital for delivery and ferrying her back to home upon her recovery after the delivery. But it seems the doctors wilfully showed disregard to these instructions, resulting in loss of crucial time and ultimately the death of the newborn. However, this is not the first incident to have taken place. Recently, there was an uproar in Kashmir after a pregnant Gujjar women was turned away by doctors at Lal Ded Hospital in Srinagar who used racist and casteist language against the family which belongs to the most marginalised and the poorest of poor of Jammu and Kashmir. The woman later delivered a baby on the roadside barely some distance away from LD hospital, exposing the rot in the system. The fact that these cases of medical negligence are repeating with eerie regularity reflects the sorry state of affairs in the state’s health department. Very often one gets to hear about the cases of medical negligence not only at the hospitals situated in the peripheries of Jammu and Kashmir but in the capital city Srinagar as well. While millions of rupees are spent annually on developing the health sector, the professionals working there are not being held accountable. As with the rest of cases, the government needs to step in and ensure that the culprits in Kalaroos cases are punished sternly so that such incidents don’t occur again!