The patient died two days later and the minister has ordered a probe into the incident. Hospital authorities admit that the incident took place but say ``it's not a big issue''.

On June 29, some employees of the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya District Hospital in Moradabad threw out a patient, aged around 35, to make the hospital look better. He was admitted with multiple fractures and head injury after an accident and his feet were plastered. He was brought to the hospital by the Government Railway Police on June 19, after they found him on a railway track. He could not speak, nobody knew where he came from and there was obviously no one to look after him.

Around 10:35 in the morning, two ward boys took him on a stretcher from the isolated ward on thethird floor of the hospital and threw him in the bushes. The minister came to know of the incident and the patient was brought back before the minister's second visit.

The minister saw the miserable condition of the man and ordered an inquiry into the incident. He asked the hospital administration to take special care of the man. But on the morning of August 1, he died. Sources say he died because of malnutrition. The body has been sent for post-mortem to Agra.

M A Khan, Chief Medical Superintendent (CMS) of the hospital, says staff nurse Sushila Singh asked the patient to be thrown out. ``I had gone to receive the minister and was not there in the hospital. Later, I was told about the incident,'' he says.

``I don't understand how such an inhuman act can take place. She neither informed the matron nor the medical superintendent and asked the patient to be removed,'' Khan adds. ``This is not a big issue and we'll take appropriate action once the inquiry report is out.''

Sushila Singh, however, deniesthe charge and alleges that Khan is framing her. ``I was busy overseeing the cleaning work in the ward. I was informed by someone that the patient is lying in the bushes near the boundary wall,'' she says. ``The CMS is trying to frame me as I am the district secretary of the nurses union. The patient was with us for so many days, why will I ask someone to throw him out, that too near the minister's car?''

Singh says: ``The reality is that the patient was in a very bad shape and was not being attended to.''

Eyewitnesses told The Indian Express that the patient was thrown out and then clandestinely taken in as the word spread. ``He was in a very bad shape, and was made to lie on the floor. I didn't see him being taken out but I saw two ward boys bringing him back. When I asked them they told me they had taken him for an X-ray,'' said Nawab, a patient in the adjoining ward.

Doctors say in private that the patient was ill-treated. ``There was negligence on the part of the hospital. The patient hadturned into a human skeleton and sooner or later he would have died,'' said a doctor. However, Khan denies the charge. ``We had taken care of him. He was already like a human skeleton when he was brought here. We tried our best,'' he says.