“For the first four days that she was in the intensive care unit tied to a ventilation machine, the doctors wouldn’t even let us meet her,” says Sanjay Goenka, a Calcutta businessman, recalling his mother’s death in a Calcutta branch of a prominent group of hospitals. “We desperately wanted to let her know that we were all there and pleaded with the nurses, but they rudely told us off. Not a single doctor bothered to talk to us about her condition, far less comfort us.” If the hospital staff’s callousness came as a shock, Goenka and his family wasn’t prepared for the ‘cruelty’ which came next. “On the fifth day, a doctor supposedly attending to my mother told us coldly that her throat would have to be cut open from the front and a tube inserted in order to intravenously feed her. We learnt later through our doctor friends that this was a test procedure that hospitals were conducting on patients who they knew were dying, using them as guinea pigs. My mother was old and frail and should have been left alone....”