Women sterilised with rusty instruments

Nem Bai was told getting a tubectomy would be an easy process — that she’d be home by sunset, a few hundred rupees richer and back to work in the fields within two days.

Instead, the 35-year-old mother-of-five was incapacitated within hours of having the surgery at a mass sterilisation camp in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, her widower said. She was one of 13 women who have died since.

“The entire night she was in tremendous pain,” said Ramavtar Suryavanshi, while waiting in his village for his wife’s body to be delivered from the hospital.