Primary health centre personnel help illegal adoptions get legal status

Ongole: The staff at the primary health centres (PHCs) in Prakasam district are allegedly helping the couples who bring babies illegally for adoption, get the legal documents like birth certificate as their own baby. An incident that came to light at the Eethamukkala PHC on Sunday shone light on the activity believed to have been going on for a long time.

Vura Venkata Sudheer and Padmavathi, a couple, are residents of Eethamukkala in Kothapatnam mandal. They had a mentally retarded boy born in 2013 and the doctors declared that it would be difficult for the woman to have children further.

So the couple contacted Sanjeevaiah, a mason from Madanuru but works in Hyderabad and its surrounding areas and told him they want a child for adoption. Sanjeevaiah informed the couple about a Banjara woman, who already had three girls and delivered a fourth girl and was ready to give her away for adoption. On September 21, they received the baby girl from the Banjara couple at LB Nagar in Hyderabad and returned to Eethamukkala.

Sudheer and Padmavathi wanted a birth certificate for the baby with their names as parents. On a suggestion from locals, they approached Chalanti Prameela Prasuna, a contract nurse at the local primary health centre. Prameela tampered the records in the birth register by stating that Padmavathi had delivered a baby girl in the PHC on October 6, 2017. On November 15, Sudheer and Padmavathi met the medical officer Dr Ananda Mohan and submitted a request to process the birth certificate.

Dr Ananda Mohan who grew suspicious of the couple as they had never seen them before in the hospital. “I didn’t see the couple earlier in the hospital and sensed something was wrong. But the nurse Prameela Prasuna pestered me to issue the certificate and said that she herself had attended the delivery on October 6. As the records are tampered, I withheld the application and told them that the certificate will be issued after an inquiry,” he told The Hans India.

The medical officer conducted an internal inquiry and the staff present on duty on October 6 submitted in writing that they had not seen or attended the delivery of Padmavathi. Speaking to The Hans India, Prameela Prasuna confessed to the tampering. “We used to record the home deliveries in the village as institution deliveries.

The STs in the Bapuji colony bring the children who were delivered at homes to the hospital immediately and we treat them after entering in the birth register as born in the PHC. So I tried to do the same in this case on humanitarian grounds on the request of the couple and locals,” she said. On a tip-off from locals, programme officer BV Sagar of a non-governmental organisation HELP, child protection officer K Sekhar, Childline representative M Murali Krishna and Children Welfare Committee (CWC) officials visited Eethamukkala on Sunday and shifted the girl to Sishugruha as per the order of CWC chairman B V S E K Prasad.

Sagar said birth certification could have been issued to the couple if the medical officer had not suspected a foul play. “The officials should find how many such instances of illegal adoptions have been turned into legal ones in Eethamukkala and all other PHCs by just managing a nurse on duty,” he said.