Vadodara: Man booked for running hospital without degree

The Narmada police have booked Bhavesh Kukadiya, 39, who was arrested by Vadodara police in January this year for “creating fake Covid-19 hospitalisation documents to claim medical insurance of Rs 2.5 lakh”, for alleged culpable homicide not amounting to murder after it came to light that Kukadiya had been running a private hospital at Rajpipla in Narmada with no bonafide medical degree.

The probe into Kukadiya’s credentials, following his arrest by the Vadodara police, had the Narmada police stumble upon his fake medical degrees as well as files of 200 patients treated at his hospital since 2018, of whom 37 persons died.

In an FIR lodged at the Rajpipla police station on Wednesday evening, police named Kukadiya as an accused in the alleged death of 37 patients. Kukadiya has been booked under Sections 304 and 308 of the Indian Penal Code for culpable homicide not amounting to murder and indulging in a willful act that could pose threat to the life of people or cause death.

SP, Narmada, Himkar Singh, said the district police waited for over two months for complainants to come forward after the news of Kukadiya being a quack became public.

Singh said, “We got intimation from Deputy Commissioner of Police, Zone III, Vadodara, following his arrest in the insurance scam in January this year. The police also verified his credentials when he claimed that he had completed his MBBS from a university in Kyrgyzstan. The police wrote to the university and found that he had never studied there.”

Singh said some of these deaths in Kukadiya’s hospitals were in 2019, while a majority of them were in 2020 after the Covid-19 outbreak. “We will question him about the possibility of having treated Covid-19 patients. We also suspect that more people could have died but not registered at the municipality’s death records bureau if they would not need the death certificate. The number 37 is only of those patients who have sought a death certificate,” Singh said.

Kukadiya is currently in Vadodara Central Jail in judicial custody in the fake insurance case. On January 23, Panigate police in Vadodara arrested Kukadiya and his dentist wife Sejal — who was the claimant in the case of the fake insurance claim of Covid-19 hospitalisation for an amount of Rs 2.5 lakh. Kukadiya had told police that he was a general physician.