[As the health care system fails, clandestine markets have emerged for drugs, oxygen, hospital beds and funeral services. Fake goods may be putting lives at risk.]
By Hari Kumar and Jeffrey Gettleman
So a local charity reacted with
outrage when one supplier more than doubled the price, to nearly $200 each. The
charity called the police, who discovered what could be one of the most brazen,
dangerous scams in a country awash with coronavirus-related fraud and
black-market profiteering.
The police say the supplier — a
business called Varsha Engineering, essentially a scrapyard — had been
repainting fire extinguishers and selling them as oxygen canisters. The
consequences could be deadly: The less-sturdy fire extinguishers might explode
if filled with high-pressure oxygen.
“This guy should be charged with
homicide,” said Mukesh Khanna, a volunteer at the charity. “He was playing with
lives.” (The owner, now in jail, couldn’t be reached for comment.)
A coronavirus second wave has
devastated India’s medical system and undermined confidence in the ability of
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to treat its people and quell the
disease. There are widely believed to be far more deaths than the thousands
reported each day. Hospitals are full. Drugs, vaccines, oxygen and other
supplies are running out.
Pandemic profiteers are filling the
gap. Medicine, oxygen and other supplies are brokered online or in hushed phone
calls. In many cases, the sellers prey on the desperation and grief of
families.
“These people, the cyber criminals,
were already out there,” said Muktesh Chander, a special commissioner for the
Delhi Police. “The moment they got this opportunity they switched on to this
modus operandi.”
Sometimes the goods are fraudulent,
and some are potentially harmful. Last week, police officers in the state of
Uttar Pradesh accused one group of stealing used funeral shrouds from bodies and selling them as
new. The day before, officers in the same state discovered more than 100
vials of fake remdesivir, an antiviral drug that many doctors in India are
prescribing despite questions
about its effectiveness.
Citing the predatory sales, a top
court in New Delhi said this month that “the moral fabric of the society is
dismembered.”
Over the past month, the New Delhi
police have arrested more than 210 people on allegations of cheating, hoarding,
criminal conspiracy or fraud in connection with Covid-related scams. Similarly,
the police in Uttar Pradesh have arrested 160 people.
“I have seen all kinds of predators
and all forms of depravity,” said Vikram Singh, a former police chief in Uttar
Pradesh, “but this level of predation and depravity I have not seen in the 36
years of my career or in my life.”
The scams and profiteering
represent the flip side of the huge online help system that has emerged to fill
the void left by the government. Do-gooders across the country have
swooped in to connect those in need with lifesaving resources.
The ad hoc system has limits. Vital
supplies like oxygen are still stuck in bottlenecks, and people keep dying after hospitals run out. Vaccine and
pharmaceutical makers can’t keep up. Politicians in some places are
threatening people who publicly plead for supplies.
That empowers the black market,
with its exorbitant prices and dicey goods. Many people feel they have no
choice.
Rohit Shukla, a graduate student in
New Delhi, said that after his grandmother died in late April in a neighboring
state, an ambulance driver demanded $70 for the three-mile ride from the
hospital to the cremation ground, over 10 times the normal price. When the
family arrived, workers demanded $70 for firewood that should have cost $7.
Supply and demand might account for
some price increases, Mr. Shukla said, but he suspects more than that.
“Everyone is trying to profit from
this pandemic,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened to people.”
Some of the more egregious examples
can be found in the country’s struggling hospital system. Infections
and deaths are widely believed to be many times more numerous than the official
figures indicate, and in hospitals across India, all the beds have been
filled and people are dying for lack of oxygen or medicine.
Accusations by one doctor in Madhya
Pradesh have gone viral. The doctor, Sanjeev Kumrawat, said he tried to stop a
local activist for India’s governing party from selling access to beds in a
government hospital where he works. “We all know that to get a bed is a big
struggle all around,” Dr. Kumrawat said in an interview. “Government resources
are to be distributed equitably and can’t become the property of one person.”
The activist, named Abhay
Vishwakarma, disputed the accusations but said he had asked the local
authorities to investigate. “I don’t know why the doctor has accused me,” he
said in an interview.
A brisk market has developed for
contraband plasma, which many doctors in India have used to treat Covid-19
patients. Police officers in the city of Noida, in Uttar Pradesh, on Wednesday
arrested two men they accused of selling plasma for up to $1,000 per unit.
According to the police, one of the men begged for plasma donors for his own
needs on social media, then sold the plasma through a middleman.
Young cybersleuths are trying to
help by cruising social media sites to find scammers.
Helly Malviya, a university
student, flagged a Twitter post advertising a drug, tocilizumab, an
anti-inflammatory drug sometimes used to treat Covid-19 patients with pneumonia
that is hard to find in India. The seller wanted $2,000 in advance. Ms. Malviya
flagged the post as a possible scam and received a flurry of messages, but they
were from people desperate for the drug.
“This is the kind of helplessness
people are facing these days,” she said.
Remdesivir, the antiviral drug, has
been the focus of a number of scams. The police in New Delhi recently said they
had arrested four people working at medical facilities who swiped unused vials
of remdesivir from dead patients and sold them for about $400 each. Before the
drug became so scarce in India, hospitals were charging about $65 for it.
The Surin family, from the city of
Lucknow, recently paid more than $1,400 to a middleman for six doses of
remdesivir. Lucky Surin, an event manager, said the family had little choice.
Her mother and sister-in-law were seriously sick. Her mother has since died.
“What do we do?” asked Ms. Surin.
“If the doctor has prescribed it, then you have to buy it.”
Dr. Jawed Khan, owner of the
hospital that prescribed the drug for the Surins but couldn’t provide it, said
families could procure their own and physicians would check vials and labels
for authenticity.
Some scammers try to get around
such safeguards. The police in the western state of Gujarat this month
discovered thousands of vials of fake remdesivir during a bust. A
tipster led them to a factory where they recovered 3,371 vials that were filled
with glucose, water and salt.
Many other doses had already been
sold and maybe even put into patients’ bodies, the Gujarat police said, posing
a public health risk of unknown scale.
Those who turn to the black market
often know they are taking a gamble.
Anirudh Singh Rathore, a
59-year-old cloth trader in New Delhi, was desperately seeking remdesivir for
his ill wife, Sadhna. He acquired two vials at the government-mandated price of
about $70 each. He needed four more.
Through social media, he found a
seller willing to part with four more vials for about five times that price.
First, two arrived. When the second two were delivered, he noticed the
packaging was different from the first batch. They had been made by different
companies, the seller explained.
The Rathores had their doubts, but
Sadhna’s oxygen levels were dropping and they were desperate. Mr. Rathore said
they gave the doses to the doctors, who injected them without being able to
determine whether they were real or fake. On May 3, Ms. Rathore died.
Mr. Rathore filed a police report
and one of the sellers was arrested, he said, but he has been racked with
guilt.
“I have the regret that probably my
wife would have been saved if those injections were original,” he said, adding
that the police had sent the vials to be tested.
“People are using the crisis period
for their own benefit,” Mr. Rathore said. “This is a moral crisis.”
Hari Kumar is a reporter in the New
Delhi bureau. He joined The Times in 1997. @HariNYT
Jeffrey Gettleman is the South Asia
bureau chief, based in New Delhi. He is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for
international reporting and the author of the memoir, "Love,
Africa." @gettleman • Facebook
