Patna: Health minister Mangal Pandey has pulled up civil surgeons and government officials over poor implementation of the family planning programme, a day after a Gardanibagh resident who underwent tubectomy was found to be four months pregnant.

While the minister said officials involved in implementing family planning programmes and not showing result-oriented performance should be removed from their post, civil surgeon Pramod Jha called up Manjula Rani, deputy superintendent of the Gardanibagh hospital where Aarti Devi underwent tubectomy last month, to seek a report. "Right now, I cannot say there was irregularity on the part of the doctor," he said. "I will have to look into the relevant file day after tomorrow (Monday), when office reopens. As of now, we have offered the woman the hospital's services in case she wants to discontinue her pregnancy. Tubectomy is known to fail when instead of the fallopian tube the wrong tube is tied up. "

Jha said no immediate departmental action was going to be initiated in the case.

At the family planning review meeting at Adhiveshan Bhavan on Saturday, minister Pandey pointed out various loopholes in the functioning of health department officials involved in the programme. "Famiy planning-related review meetings are held at the district level," Pandey said. "Then why can't we see results? This is further corroborated with a dip in the number of family planning procedures among both men and women."

"If we look at the figures of 2016-17 and 2017-2018, there is huge dip in the number of family planning procedures conducted in the later phase. Till January during 2016-17, 3.42 lakh people (both male and female) were covered in the family planning programme," the minister said. "The figure came down to 2.94 lakh in January 2017-18. Till January in 2016-17 vasectomies had been conducted on 2,750 people. The figure came down to 1,608 till January in 2017-18." Pandey asked health department principal secretary Sanjay Kumar and special secretary Lokesh Kumar Singh to remove officials who were not giving result-oriented performance in the programme.

Earlier, deputy commission of the Union health ministry's family planning division S.K. Sikdar had presented data that showed Bihar was ninth in the country in terms of sterilisation-related deaths per lakh procedures. Andhra Pradesh , Odisha and Uttarakhand are among the top three states vis-à-vis sterilisation-related deaths.

Sikdar also said that around 41 per cent of couples' contraceptive demands were unmet in the state while the state ranked third, after Bengal and Assam, in teenage pregnancy cases, one of the main factors behind maternal and infant mortality rate.

On the occasion family planning related officials, whose performance was found to be remarkable, were also felicitated.