Cuttack, April 6: The court of sub-divisional judicial magistrate (SDJM) here today directed the SCB Medical College and Hospital to cough up Rs 5 lakh for violating laws related to biomedical waste management.

In 2010, the Odisha State Pollution Control Board had filed a criminal case against the SCB and the then superintendent, Dhirendranath Moharana, in the SDJM court for violation of the Biomedical Wastes (Management and Handling), Rules, 1998. The violations related to segregation, treatment and disposal of biomedical waste.

The court found both the accused guilty of commission of offence under the Environment Protection Act and ruled: "...anybody and everybody of the society being potential recipients of the infection arising out of improper waste management are the victims in this case, even though a victim has not been identified specifically".

"This is the second conviction in biomedical waste rule violation against any government hospital in the state after the Jagatsinghpur district headquarters hospital," board's counsel Prafulla Kumar Lenka told The Telegraph.

The court directed the SCB to pay the victim Rs 5 lakh as compensation. "The victim in this case has not been specifically identified. But, they are omnipresent, and at any point of time, the victim can be identified till there is mismanagement of biomedical waste, generated from the hospital," SDJM, Cuttack, Bibaswat Gautam, ruled.

"Hence, such compensation amount shall be kept with the member secretary of the board as a corpus with lock-in period of two years. During that period, whenever a victim of such mismanagement of the SCB will be identified, he will be compensated out of that corpus proportionately, according to the injury sustained by him, and as determined by the member secretary on the basis of his own prudence and discretion," the judge specified in his order.

"After that lock-in period, whenever the board will be satisfied that the provisions of the rules have been duly complied with, in respect of waste generated from the SCB, that corpus amount or the residuary thereby shall be released in favour of the medical itself and same shall be used for further improvement of the biomedical waste management facility of the hospital alone," the order further specified, while granting 15 days time for compliance.

The SDJM also sentenced Moharana to undergo simple imprisonment for a period of four months and pay Rs 10,000 fine. Moharana, who is a professor in medicine department of the medical college, was, released on bail for Rs 10,000 and one surety of like amount.