Gender test racket busted, woman among 2 arrested

GURUGRAM: An inter-district sex determination racket was busted by the district health department on Friday. The team nabbed a tout and a woman who conducted gender tests in Kaithal district. The health authorities said that the woman didn’t use an ultrasound machine, instead used a doppler foetal monitor, thereby conning her patients by giving them fake results.
Acting on a tip-off, the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) team sent a decoy patient to their clinic around 11am on Friday. As planned, the tout who was identified as Vijay, reached the spot at 11am. He said he only has a motorcycle and would only take only the pregnant decoy along with him. However, the tout took her to a spot in Hanuman Vatika, which was not the meeting point as planned by them. At Hanuman Vatika, they were joined by another tout identified as Parikshit. Parikshit then took the woman on his motorcycle to a home in Shakti Nagar. They took Rs 28,000 from her. Here, a woman, identified as Kiran, conducted the sex determination test on the decoy patient.

Parikshit later dropped the decoy back where Vijay was waiting, and claimed she was carrying a girl child. The touts then brought her back to Hanuman Vatika, where the PNDT team nabbed them and later raided their premises in Shakti Nagar.

The team recovered the money from them. They also confiscated the machine, which turned out to be a doppler foetal monitor, not an ultrasound machine. They said Kiran used the foetal doppler to cheat pregnant women and conduct fake gender tests. Even though Kiran is not a qualified medical practitioner, she had injections, medicines, syringes, gloves and other medical instruments, and used them to clinically terminate pregnancy. “Kiran didn’t conduct the test. And Vijay still said the decoy patient is carrying a girl. We are probing if they claimed so in an attempt to fleece more money from the decoy patient because they had planned to arrange for an illegal abortion too,” said Dr Saryu Sharma, deputy chief medical officer, Gurugram.