Doctors sentenced to imprisonment for sex determination tests

The District Sessions Court here upheld the punishment of one-year rigorous imprisonment of two doctors but acquitted another medico yesterday for conducting sex determination tests.
The gender-determination test racket was exposed by a Satara-based social activist and lawyer Varsha Deshpande who had conducted a sting operation at Bhagwan Hospital in Beed district of Maharashtra on September 7, 2005.
The Beed city-based Bhagwan Hospital belongs to a doctor called Madhav Sanap who had conducted sonography of a woman called Kavita Lokhande and informed her that the foetus was that of a male.
The then district civil surgeon B D Pawar had later inspected the hospital premises and sealed the sonography machine and some relevant documents.

In January 2012, former Chief Judicial Magistrate S S Salvi had convicted doctors Madhav Sanap, P A Sayyed and Arun Satpute for illegally using a sonography machine to determine the gender of foetuses under relevant sections of the PCPNDT Act.
Sanap, Sayyed and Arun Satpute had appealed to the Principal District Judge Court against their conviction in 2012.
On August 14, 2014, the Principal District Judge Ashok Bhatkar heard their appeal and upheld the earlier sentence of one year's rigourous imprisonment for Sanap and Sayyed while Satpute has been acquitted.