Rajpati Devi, a resident of Kharagpur, was brought to Nil Ratan Sarkar (NRS) Medical College and Hospital at around 5 pm on Wednesday. “We were made to wait for two-and-a-half hours after which the hospital authorities said that she could not be treated here and referred her to the emergency ward at CNCI,” said C P Sharma, Rajpati’s son.

At 8 pm Sharma brought her mother to the CNCI but the guards posted outside the hospital’s gate stopped them from entering. “The gates were closed and there was no doctor in sight. The guards said that we would have to wait till the morning before she could be attended to. She, however, died at 4.30 am today,” said Sharma.

Sharma, who works in a medical store near the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus at Kharagpur, said that the ward-master present there at threatened them of police action if they did not carry away the dead body. “I requested the hospital authorities to issue a death certificate but they turned me away,” said Sharma.

The hospital authorities said that they have not received any formal complaint and said that the guards could have handled the issue better by at least informing the doctors inside