Many hopes and a family’s desperate bid to save a life crash with an air ambulance

Death, they say, does not like to be cheated. And who would know that better than the family of Sanjay Kumar Shaw, the burns patient who was being flown to Delhi by his family in a desperate attempt to save his life.

And death did not claim the 41-year-old hotelier alone; six others lost their lives too as the air ambulance crashed in a Jharkhand forest late on Monday (February 23) evening. Among them were his wife Archana Devi, a relative, Dhruv Kumar, his doctor, Vikas Kumar Gupta, nurse Sachin Kumar Mishra, and pilots Vivek Vikas Bhagat and Savrajdeep Singh.

Not only is the Shaw family in utter shock, so are the relatives of the other victims.

A fateful fire in an eatery

It all started with a fire at Shaw’s eatery at Chandwa in Jharkhand’s Latehar district last Monday (February 16). Shaw, who suffered 65 per cent burns in the blaze sparked by a short circuit, was admitted to a private hospital in Ranchi. But his condition did not improve and doctors reportedly referred him to Sri Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi.

Also read: All 7 on board Ranchi-Delhi air ambulance killed in crash in Jharkhand

Since travelling to Delhi by road or even by a regular flight would not be possible, the family decided to fly him out by an air ambulance. It did not come cheap. The desperate family reportedly borrowed Rs 8 lakh from relatives to rent the air ambulance for Rs 7.5 lakh and saved the rest for his subsequent treatment in the private hospital in Delhi.

A desperate family

Shaw’s brother Ajay told India Today that the family was even ready to sell their land to get him treated. He was the sole breadwinner of the family, and now, his two children have been left orphaned as they lost both parents in the crash.

Another brother, Vijay, had gone to see them off at Ranchi airport. He said they had just reached home when they learnt about the crash from TV news.

The family blamed the tragedy on the lack of decent medical facilities in Ranchi. “Had we been able to get proper medical treatment for Sanjay in Ranchi, seven lives could have been saved. I lost both Sanjay and my sister Archana,” his brother-in-law told news agency PTI.

Inconsolable relatives

As grieving friends and relatives gathered at the Shaw house in Latehar, gloom shrouded Chatra hospital as well, where the bodies of all seven deceased were shifted for post-mortem.

Bajrangi Prasad, the father of Dr Vikas Kumar Gupta, who also died in the crash, said he had sold all his land to make his son a doctor. Dr Gupta was posted at Ranchi’s Sadar Hospital.

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“He has a seven-year-old son... He was meritorious and had completed his MBBS from Odisha’s Cuttack,” said Prasad, who is from Bihar’s Aurangabad district.

Sachin Kumar Mishra’s brother said he had worked as a nursing staff for many years. “Sachin was everything to me. He was like my own child. For the past two to three years, he had been working in an ambulance service,” said the inconsolable brother.

Arranged by a patient

Anant Sinha, the CEO of Devkamal Hospital in Ranchi, where Shaw was under treatment, told PTI that the Beechcraft C90 air ambulance, operated by Delhi-based charter service Redbird Airways Pvt Ltd, was arranged by one of their patients.

The plane took off from Ranchi at 7.11 pm. It established contact with Kolkata at 7.34 pm and then lost contact at about 100 nautical miles south-east of Varanasi. The plane crashed in a forest area of Kasaria Panchayat in Chatra district, apparently due to poor weather conditions.

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And, as a member of Shaw’s family said, everything was over in a moment.

(With agency inputs)