A lethal dose of silence Premium

Heartbreaking story of a young pharmacist's tragic end due to exploitation and abuse in a hospital internship.

On a blistering Sunday afternoon on March 23, sixty-year-old farmer Ranga Rao received a call from his daughter Devi (name changed). She asked him where he was and if he had had his lunch. Ranga Rao told her he was busy feeding the buffaloes and would have it afterwards. A few moments of silence later, Devi disconnected the call.

For Rao and his wife Ananta Lakshmi, their daughter was everything. Born to them 12 years into their marriage, she was the anchor of their existence. Bright and affectionate, Devi was pursuing Pharm D. (Doctor of Pharmacy), a six-year course comprising five years of academic study and a year of internship, at a private college in Rajamahendravaram, 90 km from her village in a tribal pocket in the Eluru district; she was just a month away from completing her course. But, it was not to be.

Five hours after that call ended, Devi allegedly self-administered a powerful anaesthetic in an attempt to end her life while on duty at KIMS-Bollineni Hospital in Rajamahendravaram, where she was interning as a clinical pharmacist. Eleven days of struggle later, she was dead.

A suicide note believed to have been written by the 24-year-old narrates an insidious tale of exploitation, manipulation and torture that she suffered silently until it was too much.

“She wanted to be a software engineer but respected my wish to see her as a doctor or a pharmacist,” says Rao, sitting in his crumbling cattle shed and staring at an old moped gathering dust in a corner. On it, he used to pick up Devi from the bus station nine kilometres away whenever she returned home on short vacations over the past six years. He hasn’t touched it since her death.

Ranga Rao and Sita Lakshmi, who belong to a backward class community, migrated to the tribal pocket in Eluru district from Chintoor Agency in Alluri Sitarama Raju district after their wedding. The family had some ancestral land in Chintoor Agency, which Ranga Rao hoped would offer a financial safety net for the family.

When Devi was pursuing her Intermediate, however, the entire ancestral property, which fell in the submergence area of Polavaram Irrigation Project, was taken over by the government—the compensation was ₹7 lakh. Another parcel of the family’s land in the Eluru village, too, was acquired for the right main canal of the project around the same time. More recently, half of the family’s six-cent house site was earmarked for demolition to make way for National Highway 365BB, a greenfield highway connecting Andhra Pradesh with Telangana.