Once again Bombay City has allowed an injured man to die practically without any medical assistance. On Wednesday evening at 4-30 sixty-year-old Shri B. N. Gokhale, a retired railway employee, was trying to board a local train Vile Parle. He slipped and fell and had sustained serious injuries in the head. The injured man was not taken to the KEM Hospital until around 6-30 p.m. In other words, the old man bled literally for two hours. It is strange that the cause of his death was given as “accidental injuries” in the post mortem….. Did the doctor who conducted the post mortem take into account the fact that delay in medical assistance might have been a contributory cause for death? There was callous indifference exhibited both by the railway and the police authorities who were waiting For Panch Nama procedures as the old man’s life was literally ebbing away, drop by drop. Right in Vile Parle there is the Nanavati hospital; medical assistance could have been summoned to the railway station if there was to be delay with the red-tape. Nothing of the sort was done. There is yet another aspect to the callousness of the city. While the injured man died at 8-30 p.m. his body could not be released for the last rites until 2 p.m. the next afternoon, again because of red-tape and delay. It is high time that both authority and the public woke up to this callous aspect of life in the city. How many more injured people should be allowed to die on the footpath and in busy thoroughfares without any medical aid? Has the city no conscience?
(EDIT, September 13, 1958.)
