Resident doctors protest in Mumbai. (Fotocorp)

Mumbai, April 19: A woman gave birth in a taxi today, with help from pedestrians and traffic constables, after being refused admission at a city hospital.

The government-run Bhabha Hospital had told Seema Bano that it had been left short-staffed by a five-day-old doctors’ strike that has forced hospitals across Maharashtra to refuse patients.

Seema and her husband were rushing to a charitable hospital in Mahim, 5km away, but the baby would not wait.

Her ordeal mirrors that of hundreds of patients in Bengal, who are regularly turned away from hospitals and health centres, usually because of truant doctors, lack of beds, and even unpaid bribes. In Bengal, too, women have been known to give birth under roadside trees or on local trains after finding the labour room shut to them.

If Seema’s story had a happy ending, Karuna Sahukar’s came close to a tragic one. The 66-year-old had waited two hours outside the outpatient department at King Edward Memorial Hospital here before being told to leave because her excruciating stomach pain didn’t count as an emergency.

When she began vomiting blood back home, her pan-seller son Viral took her to Holy Family Hospital, which being a charitable hospital is outside the ambit of the strike. “They said she had a perforated peptic ulcer and could have died of blood loss without timely treatment,” Viral said.

Karuna was among the lucky few — the rush has forced charitable hospitals to limit themselves to admitting only accident victims and cardiac arrest cases.

KEM, the city’s largest civic hospital, attends to some 4,000 outpatients daily but treated only 717 yesterday. It admitted just 24 of the 1,200 who had queued up. Of the hospital’s 700 resident doctors, only 52 had reported for work.

Over 6,000 resident doctors and medical students are agitating at government hospitals against the state’s decision to junk 242 postgraduate seats because the courses are not recognised by the Medical Council of India.

The government has sacked 92 doctors in Nagpur and 219 in Aurangabad but the strikers are unfazed. They were to meet higher education minister Dilip Valse Patil late tonight for a written assurance on the PG seats.