Doon rehab inmates were kept hungry for days

DEHRADUN: At a nondescript two-storey building in Dehradun's Chandrabani area, a primary school operates during the day on the ground floor and on the second floor is the deaddiction centre where 24-year-old Siddharth Berla was allegedly thrashed all night on Monday till he died. His body was flung from a car in front of his house the next morning.
When TOI visited the Parivartan Rehabilitation Centre, a “unit of Aradhya Foundation Society”, on Wednesday and met some of the inmates at the drug de-addiction facility, horror stories tumbled out.
Two patients TOI spoke to said beatings were frequent and routine, so were hunger and lack of hygiene. “No doctor or counsellor ever visited. Wewere never treated for our addiction, simply beaten up and denied food. It was a torture chamber,” one said. There were 12 patients, including Berla, at the centre at the time of the incident on Monday. On Tuesday, all of them were taken back by their families.
One of the patients, who had beenadmitted at the centre in January, said “assault was common”. “We were forced to clean faeces of the three pet dogs of the centre’s director Prashant Juyal (who was detained on Tuesday, hours after Berla’s death). We were made to clean the toilets and wash utensils in the kitchen. We would be beaten brutally if we refused. ” He added that patients were denied food for up to three days in a row. “They would just give us water for days,” he said.
Inside the centre, a “certificate” carrying the name of Dr Vineet Kumar Gupta, one of Dehradun’s most prominent psychiatrists, could be seen. But that, too, was a scam. Gupta said he had no association with the centre.
Berla was admitted to the centre on March 21. He had completed just 22days at the facility before he was killed. “The night he died, he was pleading with the staff to allow him to go home. One of them then picked up a baton and hit Berla, who was kept hungry throughout the night and beaten thrice more until he was unconscious. When Juyal came to the centre at about 6. 30am on Tuesday, he found Berla dead. He moved the body to a car, which was used to dump a lifeless Berla in front of his house,” an inmate added.
Deputy superintendent Pankaj Gairola said, “We are probing the role of the four accused — Juyal, Mohan Thapa, Ajay Sharma and Manish Chaudhary. We will also investigate whether the centre was running as per regulations. ” He said they are yet to receive the final post-mortem report.