Two weeks after the death of a tribal woman, Budhni Devi (40) due to a blood transfusion error former CM Arjun Munda on Sunday launched a sharp critique against the Jharkhand government.
Event Context
In a formal letter to CM Hemant Soren he stated that recurring medical blunders were severely damaging public trust and raising alarming questions about the state’s constitutional accountability to protect its indigenous population.
Team Analysis
The victim was an indigenous resident of Bagdu village. She was admitted to Birsa Institute of Medical Science and Research Centre in Khunti for kidney stone treatment. After the operation, three units of blood and one unit of plasma were transfused. Later, staff realised she had been transfused with the wrong blood group (Group A+ instead of O+). She was referred to RIMS on July 3, where she died on July 5.
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According to the letter, medical personnel allegedly administered a completely mismatched blood group to Purti. The severe procedural error led directly to her death. Munda condemned the incident as a criminal failure rather than an isolated clinical mistake, emphasising that it violated the basic right to life guaranteed under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution.
The letter underscores that Jharkhand’s rural healthcare framework is suffering from systemic monitoring failures. To prove a wider trend of negligence, Munda cited an incident from October 2025 in West Singhbhum (Chaibasa). In that case, five innocent tribal children suffering from thalassemia were transfused with HIV-infected blood.
Munda noted that the lack of institutional oversight continued to place the state’s most vulnerable communities at extreme risk.
Munda has officially requested Soren to intervene and enforce immediate systemic changes. He demanded an immediate, time-bound, and impartial high-level probe to prosecute the medical staff responsible for Purti’s death. He also demanded implementation of rigid safety audits for blood transfusions and life-saving processes across all private and public clinics.
Apart from this he also demanded the establishment of an institutional monitoring mechanism to permanently fix high mortality rates in remote tribal zones.
