It was when he saw the blood-soaked stretcher that Srikrishna Bajpayee panicked. “We were warned that the delivery might not be an easy one,” recalls the 70-year-old farmer, warming himself by a fire outside his home on a bitterly cold February afternoon in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district. “The ASHA worker in the village had marked my daughter-in-law’s pregnancy as ‘high-risk’.”
Though it happened in September 2019, Srikrishna remembers it like it was yesterday. “[Flood] waters had just receded, but it had damaged the roads, so the ambulance could not come to our doorstep,” he says. Srikrishna’s hamlet, Tanda Khurd, falls in Laharpur block, which is close to Sharda and Ghaghra rivers. Villages here are vulnerable to recurrent flash floods, making it difficult to arrange transport in emergencies.
The 42-kilometre journey from Tanda Khurd to the District Hospital in Sitapur is long for any pregnant woman in labour – longer if the first five kilometres need to be covered by a two-wheeler on uneven, slippery roads. “We had to do that to get to the ambulance,” says Srikrishna. “But the complications began [to arise] when we reached the district hospital.”
Mamata did not stop bleeding after she gave birth, to a baby girl. Srikrishna says he kept hoping for the best. “It wasn’t unexpected. We knew there might be problems. But we thought the doctors would save her.”
But when she was being moved to a ward on a stretcher, Srikrishna could not see the white sheet on it. “There was so much blood. I felt a knot in my stomach,” he says. “The doctors told us to arrange blood. We managed it quite quickly, but by the time we returned to the hospital from the blood bank, Mamata had died.”
She was 25 years old.









