A speeding Bolero mowed down three people returning from a wedding in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh late Sunday night, killing a father and his son and seriously injuring a third person. The driver fled the scene — but not before snatching a mobile phone from one of the injured victims who had recorded the accident on camera.

Ramkripal Sen, 60, his son Sandeep Sen, 32, and Hemant Kushwaha, 19, all residents of Baderapura (Saunp), were riding together on a single motorcycle after attending a wedding at a hotel in Chhatarpur. Around 11 pm, near Hama village under City Kotwali police station limits, an unidentified Bolero hit them at high speed. Ramkripal died at the spot. Sandeep and Hemant were rushed to the district hospital in critical condition, where Sandeep succumbed to his injuries during treatment. Hemant remains hospitalised.

It was Hemant who told police what happened after the crash. He had managed to record a video of the accident on his phone — but when the driver noticed, he walked up to the injured young man and snatched the device before fleeing, apparently to eliminate any footage that could identify him or his vehicle. Police recovered broken vehicle parts from the scene and are using them to trace the Bolero.

Villagers have pointed to another factor that may have contributed to the accident. A bridge construction project by a company identified as MKC is underway near Hama village, and soil and construction material have been left on the road without any barricades or warning boards in place. Witnesses said the three were stationary on the roadside because of bright oncoming headlights when the Bolero struck them and ran up onto a mound of earth.

City Kotwali Station in-charge Satish Singh reached the spot with a police team after being informed. Both bodies have been sent for postmortem. A large crowd of villagers and family members gathered at the district hospital through the night. Police are scanning CCTV footage from the area to track down the absconding driver.

The incident raises two separate concerns — a hit-and-run by a reckless driver who went as far as stealing evidence from an injured victim, and the alleged negligence of a construction company that left an unmarked hazard on a public road at night.

Six months after the first child died in Parasia, Chhindwara — six months after a routine prescription for a cough and cold became a death sentence for 26 children under the age of four — the SIT investigating India's most devastating drug poisoning scandal of 2025 has made two more arrests.

On Saturday March 7, 2026, the Special Investigation Team detained two more paediatricians from Parasia: Dr. Aman Siddiqui and Dr. S.S. Thakur. Both are accused of prescribing the banned and contaminated Coldrif cough syrup to children for commission from the manufacturer. With these two arrests, the total number of accused in custody in the Coldrif case stands at 13 — a number that includes the owner of Sresan Pharmaceuticals, multiple doctors, medical store operators, a medical representative, and their family members.

The families of the 26 dead children — who have waited six months for accountability — said the new arrests brought them some relief. They want one thing: that the guilty face the full force of the law, so that no child in India dies this way again.

What Happened: The Coldrif Tragedy, Reconstructed

The deaths in Chhindwara's Parasia subdivision unfolded in a pattern so medically predictable, and so entirely preventable, that each step of the tragedy compounds the outrage.

In early September 2025, children across Parasia began presenting at clinics with routine seasonal ailments — mild fever, cough, runny nose. The kind of symptoms that bring children to paediatricians every monsoon season across India. Doctors at multiple private clinics in the area prescribed what appeared to be a standard cough syrup: Coldrif, manufactured by Sresan Pharmaceuticals of Kancheepuram, Tamil Nadu.

The children initially seemed to recover. Symptoms subsided. Parents took their children home.

Then, days later, something went wrong. The children stopped urinating. They began vomiting persistently. They became swollen. Blood tests showed dangerously elevated creatinine and urea levels — the classic markers of acute kidney failure. Kidney biopsies confirmed the cause: diethylene glycol (DEG) poisoning.

The children — most of them between one and four years old — were rushed first to Chhindwara District Hospital. As their conditions worsened, several were transferred to Nagpur, Maharashtra's largest referral hospital. Three died in Nagpur. Six died in Chhindwara over the following days. Then more. By the time the death toll stabilised, 26 children had lost their lives.

The common thread: every one of them had been given Coldrif cough syrup.

The Chemical That Killed Them: DEG at 48.6%

Diethylene glycol is an industrial solvent. It is used in antifreeze, brake fluid, and industrial lubricants. Its presence in pharmaceutical formulations is tightly regulated globally because it is highly toxic to human kidneys — particularly in children. The permissible limit for DEG as an impurity in medicines, under Indian pharmaceutical standards, is 0.1% (w/v).

When samples of Coldrif were tested at the Government Drug Testing Laboratory in Chennai, the result was staggering: 48.6% diethylene glycol — nearly 486 times the permissible limit.

The MP government lab's own testing confirmed contamination levels of over 46%. Two independent laboratories, in two different states, found the same result within a narrow range of each other. There was no ambiguity. Coldrif was not accidentally contaminated. At 48.6% DEG, the contamination was so extreme that it points to a fundamental, systemic failure in the manufacturing process — or deliberate adulteration.

The Tamil Nadu Directorate of Drug Control declared the Coldrif sample (Batch No. SR-13; manufactured May 2025; expiry April 2027) as "Not of Standard Quality" — the regulatory euphemism for a product so contaminated it should never have reached a shelf, let alone a child's stomach.

The Arrest Timeline: From Dr. Soni to Dr. Siddiqui

The first arrest in the case was made on October 5, 2025 — Dr. Praveen Soni, a paediatrician in Parasia who worked simultaneously as a government doctor and ran his own private clinic. Most of the 26 dead children had been treated at his clinic.

Dr. Soni's arrest sparked immediate controversy in the medical community. Doctors across India protested, calling his arrest "scapegoating." Their argument: a doctor who prescribes a drug that is legally available in the market, approved and distributed by a government-licensed company, cannot be expected to independently test every medicine for DEG. His job is to diagnose and prescribe; the job of ensuring drug safety belongs to the Drug Controller.

This argument has a genuine point. But it has a significant counter-point: police informed the court that Dr. Soni was allegedly receiving a 10% commission from Sresan Pharmaceuticals on every Coldrif prescription. If true, this transforms the case from negligence into a calculated financial arrangement — one in which the doctor's incentive was to prescribe Coldrif regardless of its safety profile, and the company's incentive was to maximise prescriptions regardless of its product's quality.

The MP High Court, during a January 17, 2026 hearing, rejected bail petitions filed by Dr. Praveen Soni, his wife Jyoti Soni (proprietor of the medical store adjacent to his clinic, which sold the syrup), Rajesh Soni, and Saurabh Jain. The court called the case "extremely serious," noting that the accused's role was prima facie grave and that granting bail would send the wrong signal to society. The court also referred to the Union Government's 2023 Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) guidelines, which clearly prohibit certain drug combinations for children under four years — guidelines that were apparently not followed in the prescriptions linked to these deaths.

By the time of the two new arrests on March 7, eleven accused had already been in jail for approximately six months — including Sresan Pharmaceuticals owner G. Ranganathan and medical representative Satish Verma (arrested from Chhindwara). Three drug inspectors had been suspended for negligence and lapses in quality control.

The March 7 arrests of Dr. Aman Siddiqui and Dr. S.S. Thakur — both paediatricians at Parasia — follow the same alleged pattern: prescribing Coldrif for commission, to children too young and too vulnerable to survive the consequences of what was being put into their small bodies.

Total arrests: 13.

The Regulatory Collapse: How Coldrif Reached a Shelf

Every child who died from Coldrif represents not just a manufacturing failure but a regulatory one. The question of how a cough syrup with 48.6% DEG was manufactured, batch-certified, licensed, distributed across multiple states, and prescribed to children for months before anyone noticed — is the question that India's drug regulatory system has not yet fully answered.

Step 1 — Manufacturing: Sresan Pharmaceuticals of Kancheepuram held a manufacturing licence from the Tamil Nadu Drug Control Authority. The licence permitted production of cough syrups. Quality control processes at the facility clearly failed to detect — or chose to ignore — the catastrophic DEG contamination in Batch SR-13. The Tamil Nadu government subsequently revoked Sresan's manufacturing licence and shut down the company.

Step 2 — Batch certification: Before any pharmaceutical batch is released for sale, it must undergo quality testing by the manufacturer's in-house quality control department, with batch certificates confirming compliance with pharmacopeial standards. Batch SR-13 passed this process. Either the QC testing was fraudulent, incompetent, or both.

Step 3 — Drug inspector oversight: State drug inspectors are responsible for conducting periodic inspections of manufacturing facilities and randomly testing market samples. Three MP drug inspectors were suspended for their role in the Coldrif case — an admission that oversight failed at the state level. How the syrup circulated for months without triggering a market alert is a question that the SIT's investigation must still fully answer.

Step 4 — Commission-driven prescriptions: If the commission allegation against multiple doctors is substantiated, it reveals a corrupted doctor-pharma relationship in which a company with a substandard product uses financial incentives to ensure prescription volume, bypassing the normal market mechanism that should punish unsafe drugs through reputational failure.

Each of these four steps represents a point at which this tragedy could have been stopped. None of them worked.

The WHO Alert: India Is Not Alone in This Failure

The Coldrif case is part of a pattern that the World Health Organisation has been tracking with alarm for several years. Between 2020 and 2025, multiple incidents of DEG contamination in cough syrups and medicines manufactured in India, Indonesia, and other countries caused mass child deaths across the Gambia, Indonesia, Cameroon, and Senegal — deaths that led to the WHO issuing global medical product safety alerts.

In India's own recent history, the Marion Biotech case (2022–23) involved DEG-contaminated cough syrup linked to 66 deaths in Uzbekistan, manufactured in Uttar Pradesh. The Maiden Pharmaceuticals case involved cough syrups linked to 70 deaths in the Gambia. In both cases, Indian manufacturing facilities produced drugs with toxic contamination that passed domestic regulatory checkpoints.

The Chhindwara case is different from those in one crucial respect: the children who died were in India, on Indian soil, treated by Indian doctors, dispensed by Indian medical stores. This was not an export failure. It was a domestic regulatory collapse — one that should have been prevented at every point in the supply chain.

The FDC Violation: A Law That Was Ignored

One of the most significant revelations from the High Court hearing came in its reference to the Union Government's 2023 guidelines on Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) drugs. These guidelines explicitly restrict the use of certain drug combinations in children under four years of age — including specific combinations found in cough syrups.

The court found that these guidelines appear to have been violated in the prescriptions linked to the Chhindwara deaths. Children under four were prescribed a formulation that current national guidelines suggest should not be given to children in that age group.

This dimension of the case — the violation of FDC guidelines — is separate from the DEG contamination but equally important. It suggests that even if Coldrif had been manufactured without DEG contamination, prescribing it to very young children in the manner documented in this case may have been clinically inappropriate.

The Families: Six Months of Grief and Waiting

Behind every arrest, every court hearing, every regulatory finding, are 26 families in Chhindwara who have spent six months asking a question that no official has yet answered to their satisfaction: how did this happen?

These are families who brought their children to trusted doctors with ordinary childhood illnesses. Families who watched their children recover, then crash, then die — in hospitals that diagnosed the right condition (kidney failure from DEG) but could not undo the poisoning that had already destroyed the organs. Families who watched the government ban Coldrif, arrest doctors, suspend drug inspectors, and form an SIT — while their children were buried.

The two arrests on March 7, 2026 brought them "some relief," as TV9 reported — in the cautious, exhausted language of people who have stopped expecting dramatic justice and have learned to value incremental accountability.

They want more arrests. They want convictions. They want sentences proportionate to 26 children's lives. And they want one thing above all: that no family in India should have to ask, six months after a tragedy, why a medicine that killed their child was on a shelf in a licensed pharmacy on the day they walked in.

Key Takeaways

• On March 7, 2026, the SIT arrested two more Parasia paediatricians — Dr. Aman Siddiqui and Dr. S.S. Thakur — in the Chhindwara Coldrif case; total arrests now stand at 13.
• 26 children, most under four years old, died from acute kidney failure caused by Coldrif cough syrup contaminated with 48.6% diethylene glycol — 486 times the permissible limit.
• First arrest was made October 5, 2025: Dr. Praveen Soni, alleged to have prescribed Coldrif in exchange for a 10% commission from Sresan Pharmaceuticals.
• Sresan Pharmaceuticals, Kancheepuram (Tamil Nadu), has had its licence revoked; owner G. Ranganathan is in jail.
• Three drug inspectors were suspended for negligence and quality control failures.
• MP High Court on January 17, 2026 rejected bail for Dr. Praveen Soni and three co-accused, calling the case "extremely serious" and citing violations of FDC guidelines for under-four-year-olds.
• Coldrif was banned across MP, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, UP, Delhi, West Bengal and Puducherry.
• The case reflects a systemic pattern: India has had multiple DEG-contamination scandals — Marion Biotech, Maiden Pharmaceuticals — with inadequate regulatory reform between incidents.

In a dramatic scene on the streets of Indore on Friday evening, a young man suddenly stepped in front of the moving convoy of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Dr. Mohan Yadav, waving a banner and crying out for justice. The moment was captured on video and has since gone viral across social media — a son's desperate last resort after five months of being ignored by the police and the health department.

The young man is Rohan Chauhan. His mother is Manju Chauhan. And his story raises some of the most uncomfortable questions that modern India keeps being forced to ask about its healthcare system: Who is actually treating our patients? Who is verifying their qualifications? And who is held accountable when a life is lost?

The Convoy Moment: A Son's Cry Reaches the Chief Minister

On Friday evening, as CM Mohan Yadav's convoy passed through Indore, Rohan Chauhan stepped forward without warning. He held a banner and began shouting loudly, demanding that the Chief Minister stop and listen. Security personnel moved immediately, but CM Yadav ordered the convoy to halt.

Rohan then handed the Chief Minister a written memorandum detailing the circumstances of his mother's death and demanding action against those responsible. He warned that if justice was not delivered soon, he would launch a public agitation.

The CM receiving the memorandum does not, by itself, guarantee action. But the fact that a young man felt compelled to risk his safety to stop a VIP convoy — and that it worked — speaks volumes about the state of institutional accountability in the case.

What Happened at Harsh Clinic: The Night of October 6

The incident at the centre of Rohan's fight dates back to the night of October 6, 2025 — over five months ago.

Harsh Clinic is located in the Khatiwala Tank area of Indore. Rohan alleges that his mother Manju Chauhan was brought to the clinic and, without proper examination or diagnosis, was administered dangerous injections. Shortly after the injections, her condition deteriorated rapidly. She died the same day.

After her death, the family alleged medical negligence and demanded answers — along with her treatment documents and a death certificate. What followed was nearly two and a half hours of chaos at the clinic, with family members and residents confronting the staff.

The police, health department, and drug inspector teams arrived at the scene. After an initial inspection, the clinic was sealed.

What the Inspection Found

The health department's inspection of Harsh Clinic revealed significant and serious irregularities.

The clinic was registered in the name of Dr. Gyan Chand Panjwani. However, investigators found that for the past three months, Dr. Panjwani himself had not been physically present at the clinic. Instead, an assistant had been running the clinic in his place — treating patients, administering medications, and essentially operating a medical facility without a qualified doctor on the premises.

More alarming still was the physical setup: the clinic was functioning not as a basic outpatient facility, but as what was effectively a nursing home, with 15 beds set up inside. The clinic's registration did not permit this scale of operations.

CMHO (Chief Medical and Health Officer) Dr. Madhav Hasani confirmed at the time that preliminary findings had revealed "major irregularities." He stated that investigations were underway to determine exactly how Manju Chauhan's condition deteriorated after treatment and the circumstances of her death.

The Pakistan Degree Allegation: A Charge That Cannot Be Ignored

Rohan Chauhan's memorandum to CM Yadav contains a charge that has added an entirely new and explosive dimension to the case. He has alleged that the doctor whose name the clinic bears — Dr. Gyan Chand Panjwani — holds a medical degree from Pakistan, not from an Indian institution.

This is an allegation that demands urgent official verification. India's Medical Council Act requires that foreign medical degrees be recognised and verified by the National Medical Commission (NMC) before a doctor can practice in India. A degree from Pakistan, a country with which India has suspended most bilateral relations, would face exceptional scrutiny — and if used to register a clinic without proper verification, could constitute a serious criminal violation.

The NMC maintains a registry of registered allopathic practitioners in India. The question of whether Dr. Gyan Chand Panjwani's registration was valid, and whether it was obtained on the basis of a verified degree, is now squarely before the health authorities of Madhya Pradesh.

The Doctor's Version of Events

Dr. Gyan Chand Panjwani gave his own account of the incident at the time it occurred. He stated that Manju Chauhan had been brought to the clinic by her family on September 18 — not October 6 — and that she was suffering from a mental illness. He said he was not personally present at the clinic on that date, and his assistant had administered a saline drip as preliminary treatment.

According to Dr. Panjwani, the family subsequently took Manju to a different private hospital, and she died at that second facility the same day. He argued that the dispute arose because the family was asking for treatment documents and a death certificate — implying the confrontation was over paperwork, not negligence.

There are obvious inconsistencies between the doctor's account and the family's version, including the date discrepancy (September 18 vs. October 6), the nature of the treatment (saline drip vs. "dangerous injection"), and the location of death. These are precisely the inconsistencies that a proper police investigation and post-mortem would resolve.

The Core Failure: No Post-Mortem, No FIR

This is where Rohan Chauhan's anger becomes entirely justified — and where institutional accountability collapses.

He explicitly told CM Yadav in his memorandum that no post-mortem was conducted on his mother's body. In a case where the family alleges death due to a wrongly administered injection, the post-mortem is not optional — it is the single most critical piece of medical evidence. Without it, the cause of death cannot be independently established, and the case becomes a matter of one family's word against a clinic's denial.

Beyond the post-mortem, Rohan alleges that neither the police nor the health department have taken concrete action in the five months since his mother died. The clinic was sealed in October 2025. But sealing is an administrative action, not a criminal one. The family wants to know: has an FIR been registered? Has the assistant who was operating the clinic been identified, questioned, and charged? Has Dr. Panjwani's medical registration been formally scrutinised? Has the degree allegation been investigated?

Five months of silence suggests that the answer to most of these questions may be no.

The Bigger Picture: India's Ghost Doctor Crisis

Rohan Chauhan's case is one story. But it sits within a much larger and deeply troubling national pattern.

India has an acute shortage of qualified doctors, particularly in semi-urban and rural areas. The shortage creates a market for unqualified practitioners — people who operate under the cover of registered names, fake degrees, or outdated credentials. The NMC has repeatedly flagged this issue. State health departments conduct periodic raids. Clinics are sealed. And then, months later, they reopen, sometimes under different names.

The 15-bed setup at Harsh Clinic — functioning effectively as an unauthorised nursing home while registered as a simple clinic — is a textbook example of how this system works in practice. A registration that permits basic outpatient care is stretched, step by step, into a facility treating inpatients, administering injections, and managing conditions requiring hospital-level care.

The assistant running the clinic in Dr. Panjwani's absence is another common feature of this ecosystem: a qualified doctor lends their name and registration to a facility, collects a fee, and rarely or never shows up. Who is accountable when something goes wrong? The registered doctor denies presence. The assistant claims to have been following instructions. The patient's family has no one to hold.

What Needs to Happen Now

Rohan Chauhan's convoy protest has put this case back in the news. The Chief Minister has received the memorandum. The political moment exists to act. Here is what accountability looks like in this case:

1. FIR under Section 304A (Causing Death by Negligence): If the family's account is accurate that an injection was administered without proper examination and caused the death, this is not a civil dispute — it is a criminal matter.

2. Retrospective post-mortem or forensic review: While five months have passed, a forensic review of available evidence — medical records, drug purchase records at the clinic, witness statements — can still establish a picture of what happened.

3. NMC verification of Dr. Panjwani's degree and registration: This should have happened the day the clinic was sealed. If the degree is indeed from Pakistan and not verified by the NMC, the registration of Harsh Clinic is itself illegal.

4. Action against the assistant: Operating a medical facility without a license is a criminal offence under the Clinical Establishments Act. The assistant who ran Harsh Clinic for three months in the absent doctor's name must be identified and prosecuted.

5. Health department accountability: Why did the CMHO's investigation from October 2025 not result in any formal action? Who signed off on the decision not to pursue the case further?

Key Takeaways

• Rohan Chauhan stopped CM Dr. Mohan Yadav's convoy in Indore on March 6, 2026, demanding justice for his mother Manju Chauhan, who allegedly died after being given a dangerous injection at Harsh Clinic in Khatiwala Tank.
• Harsh Clinic is registered in the name of Dr. Gyan Chand Panjwani, but had been run by an unqualified assistant for three months in the doctor's absence.
• The clinic was functioning as an unauthorised nursing home with 15 beds, far beyond its registration scope.
• Rohan alleges the treating doctor holds a Pakistan-issued medical degree, a charge demanding urgent NMC verification.
• The clinic was sealed in October 2025 following two and a half hours of protests by residents and family members, but no criminal action or post-mortem followed.
• Rohan has warned of a public agitation if justice is not delivered soon.
• CM Yadav accepted the memorandum after halting his convoy.