Mysuru nurse reveals they did 70 infanticides a month, threw babies in Cauvery river

BENGALURU: After the Mandya police busted a female foeticide and gender selective abortion racket in the Mandya district, the police have arrested Manjula, the head nurse of Mata Hospital in Mysuru, in connection with the case. Manjula has reportedly admitted that she helped abort at least two 6-month-old babies in a month over a period of time.

Manjula said, “I used to help in about 70 infanticides a month, and I had taken out at least 6-month-old babies every month. The infants were alive. A six-month-old baby will not have a voice and would die within 5-10 minutes after being taken out from the womb. I used to wrap it in paper and give it to Nisar. He would take that child and throw it in the Cauvery river. We used to abort 12-week-old embryos and dump them as medical waste. It would decompose in four days”.

Manjula said that she has been working with Dr Chandan Ballal for the last one year. Earlier, another nurse, Reshma, used to do abortions. After Reshma quit her job, Manjula was engaged in the abortion of the infants.

During investigation, Manjuala revealed that Nisar was throwing the child into the river, but she did not know where. “If they were thrown anywhere, it may have drawn the attention of the police. The child would bleed profusely after being killed. There was another reason for the abortion of six-month-old babies. We did not have advanced scanning machines. Sometimes, we were not able to detect whether it was female or male. When we could not recognize the gender, the doctors suggested they wait for a month. When it was too late to find out the gender of a child, we used to wait for the woman to complete six months of pregnancy”.

The accused Dr Chandan Ballal

“We would take out the six-month-old babies through C-section after sedating the mothr. We would placed the child on the table and it would have died within 5 to 10 minutes while the mother would be in an unconscious state”, she said.

Dr Chandan Ballal is not a doctor, but a BAMS graduate with no idea about ultrasound scanning. He should have been giving only Ayurvedic treatment and does not have the qualifications to run a nursing home. But still, he was running a nursing home illegally, the police said.