- Monday, May 05, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
IN a tragic incident, an eight-year-old boy sat holding the corpse of his younger brother in his lap for a couple of hours outside a hospital while their father looked around for an ambulance to carry the dead family member home.
It happened in Morena district of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh on Sunday (10). As a video of the kid holding his brother’s body went viral, people slammed the authorities for being “insensitive”.
A painful video From #BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh!
An eight-year-old boy was seen sitting with the body of his two-year-old brother in MP's #Morena. The father of the deceased said that the hospital authorities failed to arrange an #ambulance.@CMMadhyaPradesh
1/2 pic.twitter.com/S5xYU9O44w— Ashif Gm (@GmAshifpf) July 10, 2022
In the video clip, the boy was seen sitting along the boundary wall of the district hospital with the covered body of his two-year-old brother, who died at the same hospital during a treatment. The family belongs to a Dalit community.
Surendra Gurjar, the hospital’s resident medical officer, said the father of the two kids, Pujaram Jatav, brought his sons from their Badfara village, located around 30 kilometres away, on Sunday morning in an ambulance after his younger son Raja was referred from another hospital.
The ambulance that took them to the hospital returned after dropping them at the hospital.
After Raja died during the treatment of anaemia and other diseases, Pujaram asked for an ambulance from the hospital to take them home but the vehicle was not available at the time, Gurjar told the Press Trust of India.
Later, a police vehicle helped the grieving family to reach home along with Raja’s corpse, he added.
According to sources, the deceased child’s elder brother was captured in the video when their father went to arrange for an ambulance, leaving the corpse with him.
Kamal Nath, chief of Madhya Pradesh’s opposition party Congress party, expressed anguish over the incident, saying that after the intervention of some locals, a vehicle was arranged to carry the body.
“In Morena, an 8-year-old innocent child was seen sitting in the hospital with the body of his 2-year-old brother in his lap. His father Pujaram Jatav kept pleading for an ambulance to take the son’s body to their village, but he did not get the vehicle for hours,” Nath said in a statement.
Claiming that such incidents have been very common in the state, Nath appealed to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who belongs to prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, to strengthen medical facilities in the state and make the system more sensitive to avoid such incidents.
