Daycare center�s negligence, booked for amputating 3-year old�s thumb

Mangalore Today News Network

May 11, 2016: The owners of a daycare centre in Gurgaon have been booked for negligence and causing grievous hurt after the thumb of a three-year-old girl was allegedly crushed there and had to be partially amputated.

The incident took place on April 28, after the child was dropped off at the daycare centre at 12.30 pm, her mother Shivani Sharma said in her complaint to police. She said barely half-an-hour later, she got a call from a teacher at the daycare centre about an ‘emergency’.

Sharma said she was was informed that her daughter had hit her thumb and had been taken to a hospital. But when she reached the hospital, Sharma said she was told that her daughter’s thumb had been amputated.

“... At 1:30 pm, when I reached Artemis hospital emergency, I was told that her thumb was amputated which means her top half part of the thumb had been crushed and cut apart. I was told that another kid pushed the door close and her finger came inside. Can you believe the situation when my 3-year-old is in front of my eyes, bleeding? The resident plastic surgeon told me that nothing can be done to broken thumb but only a surgery to close the cut. Which means for her whole life she will never have a full thumb nor any nail, instead she will have a round cut finger(sic),” Sharma wrote in a Facebook post, which has been shared by more than 10,000 users.

In her police complaint, Sharma has named the owner of the centre and his wife. She said on May 1, the owner came to her residence and apologised. She said he promised to bear the expense of the treatment as it “was a mistake on their part”.

“But since then, we have not... heard back from them. When I asked... to come to Medanta to pay for my daughter’s second surgery, she started making all kinds of excuses, like she has her school to take care of..., Sharma wrote in her post.

It will take six weeks to find out if the second surgery, to reconstruct her daughter’s thumb, was successful, said Sharma. After she filed a police complaint, the owners of the daycare centre deleted their Facebook page as well as their website.

The incident has highlighted the lack of basic safety measures in daycare centres, said Gurgaon Deputy Commissioner T L Satyaprakash. “There are no rules or guidelines under the district administration to keep a check on day-to-day activities inside such daycare centres or creches. Since there are no guidelines, we don’t have a team or a procedure to check whether these places are following basic rules.”

Shakuntala Dhull, chairperson of Gurgaon’s Child Welfare Committee, said the authorities could take action if the parents submitted a written complaint against the daycare centre owners.The accused have been booked under sections 287 and 338 of IPC and they will be arrested soon, said Station House Officer Anil of sector 56 police station.