After the death of her father two months ago due to a stroke, 17-year-old Maddela Padma bravely stepped into the role of breadwinner, working as a daily wage labourer to support her mother and five younger siblings in Sarada Colony, a densely populated slum in Guntur city of Andhra Pradesh. On February 10, the teenager developed sudden health complications. “For two days she had terrible motions and vomiting,” says Katamma Maddela, Padma’s mother, who thought her daughter would feel better eventually. Herself bedridden for the past two months after a spinal surgery, Katamma could not do much to help her daughter. On February 10 in the morning, her condition deteriorated. “We shifted her to the Government General Hospital (GGH) with the help of our neighbours,” she recalls. Within hours, Padma died.
With Padma’s passing, Katamma, who is in her 40s, finds herself at the intersection of grief and uncertainty. After her husband’s death, her daughter took on two jobs: cutting the stalks of dried red chillies before they went to the mill to be pounded, and a cleaning job in the Railways, working for a third-party service provider. She now faces the daunting challenge of earning just for her family to survive. Two of her younger daughters are still in school, studying in Class 1 and 5, while the other three — another girl and two sons, all below 15 years — have dropped out of the education system. The ₹5 lakh ex-gratia that she received from the government following Padma’s death will tide her over for a while.
Between February 10 and 13, as many as 120 people from different parts of the city, including Sarada Colony, were admitted at GGH-Guntur. Hospital superintendent Y. Kiran Kumar says eight were in critical. As the number of patients mounted, the hospital dedicated an ICU and a ward for them. “Since the incident happened over the weekend, some of the doctors were not available and the existing staff provided treatment to them,” says Kiran Kumar.
