NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday stayed a Madhya Pradesh government order depriving the adult children of the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak tragedy from availing of free healthcare from six speciality hospitals built for the affected people.
The bench of Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan, Justice RV Raveendran and Justice JM Panchal, however, found no harm in the hospitals providing medical care to general public as well if that was not at the cost of the victims.
The Madhya Pradesh government had in its Jan 1, 2008 order barred the hospitals from treating free of cost the victims' children above 18 years of age.
The bench stayed the order on arguments that the victims' children, suffering from congenital ailments due to the exposure of their parents to the poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the Union Carbide factory on the night of Dec 4, 1984, cannot be denied free treatment from the hospitals.
PS Narsimhan, the counsel for one of the petitioner organisations, the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, contended that the children of the gas leak victims cannot be denied treatment irrespective of their age in the six hospitals because these had been specially built for the victims.
On the arguments by Narsimhan, the court asked its monitoring committee, constituted to look into various welfare measures for the victims, to examine the issue of free treatment to the victims' children above the age of 18 and file its report within three weeks.
The lawyer also contended that of late the hospitals had begun treating general public as well, owing to which the number of victims availing medicare there had started decreasing.
The bench then observed that the tragedy was nearly three-decade old and it was natural that the number of those affected by it would be on decline with the lapse of time.
It did not see any harm in general public availing of free treatment at the six hospitals.
