Why this exorbitant charge for a nine-year-old? Reason: the stretcher. According to the fare rules of the Indian Airlines, anybody travelling on a stretcher in an Airbus 320 aircraft has to pay nine times the normal fare because nine seats have to be removed to accommodate a stretcher. The actual fare per person from Bhubaneswar to Hyderabad is Rs 4,360.

Since two others, including the father of Nirmal, accompanied the boy on the same flight, the Agarwals paid a total of Rs 41,990 one way.

While the Airlines offers a 50 per cent concession on fare to senior citizens, cancer patients, blind persons, students and children below 12, its unsympathetic attitude towardsserious patients like Nirmal is shocking.

A Class V student from Angul, an industrial town 160 km away from here, Nirmal was critically injured when he was hit by a truck on July 29 while cycling on the road. When doctors later found his pelvic bone badly fractured, he was shifted to a private nursing home at Cuttack. He was advised to go to Apollo Hospital after 13 days of treatment following detection of septicaemia. Lying on a stretcher with saline on, the boy was gasping.

It is intriguing that Nirmal should be charged the full fare when he qualifies for 50 per cent discount on two counts -- as a child below 12 years and as a student. His fare would have been half of what he paid even if he was charged nine times the normal fare provided he got the concession he was entitled to.

Station Manager S Mukherjee told The Indian Express that fare concessions were not available to any passenger travelling on a stretcher even if he or she was entitled to such a relief in normal times. A passenger onstretcher has to be charged on the basis of the number of seats the stretcher occupies, he maintained.

Asked why the boy could not be given the 50 per cent concession applicable to students and children below 12, the station manger said there was no such provision. As a station manager he was guided by the rules framed by the Indian Airlines board, he said.

An IA spokesperson in New Delhi remarked: ``Kids or no kids, we have rules relating to patients being carried on a stretcher. This involves removing seats on the aircraft which involves costs and additional labour. Besides we also have to lose on those nine seats.''

``We at least carry those on stretchers; ask other private airlines... they don't carry such patients,'' he added.

Had Nirmal travelled the way he did in an Airbus 300, he would have paid six times the normal fare and seven times if it was a Boeing 737.