Two patients share a bed in a hospital in Bengal.File picture

Lucknow, Nov. 13: An infant died in an Uttar Pradesh hospital hours after his birth, his head smashed by a fall from a bed shared by him, his mother, another woman and her newborn.

The dead child’s mother, Gita Mishra, said no hospital employee came to her aid despite repeated requests during the hour and a half the baby was alive after the fall on Wednesday night.

A police report said Meera Tiwari, the other lady, and her baby were sleeping with their heads in the direction of Gita’s feet to make the most of the space available.

“As she (Meera) rolled over on her sides, one of her legs hit my son. He fell to the ground and started crying. I called the hospital staff but they ignored me,” Gita said after the tragedy in Sitapur, 80km from Lucknow.

“There wasn’t a single inch left on the bed with the four of us lying on it,” Meera, shocked by the tragedy, told the district administration.

Rural children in the state face an 80 per cent higher risk of dying before their fifth birthday compared with urban children, with overcrowding and lack of care at hospitals a major reason, said Dr Abdhesh Tripathi, adviser to the state government’s health panel.

Wednesday night’s tragedy came to light last evening when Gita’s relatives alleged in a written complaint to the district magistrate that the hospital staff were trying to suppress the accident and their negligence.

Sources said Gita, a homemaker, had been admitted to the District Women’s Hospital on Tuesday and delivered a child on Wednesday morning.

Mother and child were then shifted from the labour room to a bed. An hour later, Meera too was shifted to the same bed with her newborn.

The state government has ordered a probe, Sitapur chief medical officer V.K. Verma said. He admitted that mothers and babies often had to share beds when the hospital got overcrowded. “But hospital employees should remain alert when two mothers are moved to a single bed,” he added.

Some 55 of every 1,000 Indian children die within a year of their birth, the figure being 67 in Uttar Pradesh. Unicef said in a report this year that the Indo-Gangetic plain had one of the world’s highest child mortality figures.