More than 3 out of 5 women opt for sterilisation in Telangana

Around 0.5 percent of men in rural Telangana and 1.3 percent of men in urban Telangana use condoms, while 0.5 percent of women in rural Telangana and 1.2 percent in urban Telangana use contraceptives. Intrauterine devices (IUDs) are used by only 1 percent of the female population.

The burden of family planning remains on women: It is on them to go undergo sterilisation.

It should be noted that around 38.6 percent of the population in India opts for sterilisation, of which 36.3 percent were women.

Sterilisation in Telangana

The sterilisation camps organised by the Telangana government usually involve tubectomy surgeries on women.

In the mid-1970s, India introduced a national family-planning programme through which mass sterilisation campaigns were started for population control.

In 2016, the Supreme Court directed the Central government to end mass sterilisation camps, saying that poor and tribal men and women could not be reduced to mere statistics in the country’s population-control campaigns.

After the judgement, the Union government left it to states to decide how they would conduct family planning.

According to the Telangana State Health Department, a total of 38,656 sterilisation surgeries were performed in 111 camps from April to July this year. Around 1.1 lakh sterilisation operations were carried out in 2021-22.

Dozens of women are operated on in a few hours in a single sterilisation camp.

“All the surgeries were carried out within an hour and a half. All the 34 women who were operated upon at the Community Health Centre at Ibrahimpatnam were out of the centre after an hour of their surgeries,” said a family member of a patient who got sterilised in Ibrahimpatnam in Telangana’s Rangareddy district, at the same camp where four women died after surgery.

The government on Tuesday said that all the women came voluntarily for the surgery.

However, the family members said that it was the Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHAs, who approached them to get the women sterilised at the camp.

“My mother was asked by one of the ASHA workers in the area to get my wife sterilised as I already have two kids. That is why I took my wife to the camp,” said the husband of a 22-year-old woman who was sterilised at the Ibrahimpatnam camp.

“The government organises these sterilisation camps every month, and each time one or two women from the village get sterilised there,” he said.

“I took my wife with my mother-in-law to the hospital at 10 am. My wife was admitted and given anaesthesia by the nurse around noon. She was taken to the operating room after half an hour. She was out of the operating room within five minutes. She was made the share a bed with another woman as she recovered. By 2:30 pm, she was discharged from the hospital,” said the husband of a patient from the Arutla village near Ibrahimpatnam.

After they reached home, some of the patients started to develop an infection around the incision area.

“The next day, she had pus around the incision area. We went to the hospital again, and there we are told it was normal after surgery. Three days later, she was admitted to NIMS. Doctors have taken samples of her pus and said that the infection was more severe than usual,” said the Arutla man.

“The doctors are experienced. Some have even performed around 400 surgeries in a day. It’s not about the experience of the doctor. Four senior surgeons usually do sterilisation surgeries in our state, and this doctor was one of them. The same doctor performed around 60 surgeries in the Suryapet district, and we did not receive any complaint from there,” a health official from the Rangareddy district told South First.

Sterilisation is considered the best method of family planning because it gives a 100 percent result.

“We conduct sterilisation camps regularly. Sterilisation has become easy and fast after the introduction of laparoscopic surgery, and women also recover fast after it,” added the health official.

According to the NFHS-5 data, half of the women who undergo sterilisation have the operation by the age of 25.7 years. In the case of Ibrahimpatnam, the women were aged 22-32.

Interestingly, according to the NFHS-5 data, the fertility rate in Telangana is only 1.75 percent.

The myth of male sterilisation

Vasectomy — the method of male sterilisation — is however a simpler procedure than tubectomy.

However, its prevalence is quite low in the state as well as in the country.

“Vasectomy is a simple procedure, and recovery is also fast, but the misconception of men losing their libido after the surgery weighs heavy on their mind,” Hyderabad-based gynaecologist Dr Kavitha Sudha told South First.

“Also, men think that if the wife woman is getting sterilised, why should they get it done?” she added.

Status of Ibrahimpatnam camp women

The 25 August sterilisation camp in Ibrahimpatnam in the Rangareddy district has been in the eye of the storm for quite a few things, not the least of which were the red flags raised when the Telangana government offered decided to compensate the families of the first two deceased women with — among other things — 2BHK flats.

Since then, two more of the 34 women who were operated upon at the camp have died, while the remaining 30 are admitted to hospitals in Hyderabad. Of these 13 are admitted to Apollo Hospitals and 17 are admitted to NIMS Hospital.

“The patients who underwent surgery on 25 August have been kept under medical observation at various hospitals in Hyderabad as a measure of abundant precaution. All the patients are stable and doing well. They are likely to be discharged in the next couple of days,” said Dr G Srinivasa Rao, Director of Public Health, Telangana, in a statement.

On Wednesday, Telangana Health Minister T Harish Rao said that the initial findings suggested that the four women died due to an infection.

Meanwhile, Telangana Vaidya Vidhana Parishad Commissioner Dr J Ajaya Kumar told reporters on Thursday that family-planning operations would stop temporarily in Telangana.

“The government is changing surgery regulations. According to the new regulations, only 10-15 surgeries will be performed in a day,” he said.