Indian Express| Tamilnadu | Tuesday, December, 04, 2018
The lab was being run without due permissions from the health department and no nod was taken for installing equipment as well.
THIRUVANNAMALAI: Authorities of the Department of Health and the police raided an illegal sex determination laboratory functioning at Ponnusamy Nagar, Vengikkal in Tiruvannamalai town at midnight on Saturday before arresting three persons, including a couple, for doing illegal tests.
Based on a tip-off, a team of officers from the Tamil Nadu Medical and Rural Health Services, Chennai, visited Tiruvannamalai on Saturday. Led by Joint Director of Medical Services, Tiruvannamalai, Dr D Pandian, they swooped down on the illegal laboratory.
They found the lab being run without due permissions from the health department and no nod was taken for installing equipment as well.
“We raided the illegal laboratory following specific information on sex-determination. We seized the machinery installed at the lab and sealed it,” said Pandian.
Fifty-one-year-old Ananthi, her husband Tamilselvan, 52, and an autorickshaw driver, Sivakumar, 42, who acted as a broker to lure pregnant women, were arrested by the police.
Tiruvannamalai East Police Inspector D Subramani said that the trio was booked under
sections 15, 23, 27 of Pre Conception Pre Natal Diagnosis Tests (PCPNDT) Act and 419 and 420 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) before remanding them to judicial custody.
Inquiries revealed that Ananthi, who had worked in hospitals where she gained knowledge, charged Rs 6,000 for a single test and had paid the broker Rs 2,000 for each case he towed to the laboratory.
She had been running the laboratory at Ponnusamy Nagar for a few months in a palatial house building.
Police officials said that this was the third time she was arrested for running the illegal sex-determination
laboratory. She was imprisoned twice in 2014 and 2016 for committing the same offence.
It is stated that she used to refer pregnant women, who volunteer to go for abortion if the foetus was diagnosed a female, to some other place. The authorities are yet to probe the place where she
referred the women for abortion.
On Sunday itself, she received about 20 calls over her mobile for taking the sex-determination test even after being detained, the officials noted.
