The protest outside the West Bengal Medical Council’s Salt Lake office was triggered by the death of four-year-old Aranya Roy, but the facts reported around the case point to a wider institutional problem: how effectively the state verifies medical registrations and acts when the identity or credentials of a practitioner are in doubt. Aranya’s parents, Jayanta Roy and Shilpi Roy, travelled from Monteswar in Purba Bardhaman to join a protest by doctors aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party. They were seeking justice for their son and faster action in the investigation into his death.
According to Anandabazar’s report, Aranya was admitted to a nursing home in Purba Bardhaman on 2 September for treatment of phimosis. The child died on the day of admission. The treatment was reportedly provided by Saidul Haque, whose registration has since been cancelled. Jayanta Roy told the newspaper that three people—Anisur Mondal, Suraj Ahmed and Kaushik Dutta—had been arrested in the 27 days since the incident, while another five or six accused persons, including a doctor, remained at large. The parents also went to Bidhannagar South police station from the protest site to request a faster investigation.
The case has therefore moved across three systems at once: criminal investigation, medical regulation and the operation of private healthcare facilities. Each has a separate responsibility. Police must establish the circumstances of the child’s death and identify those accountable. The medical council must determine whether the people presenting themselves as doctors were legally registered and whether professional action is required. The nursing home and the wider health administration must answer how treatment was provided and what safeguards were in place before admission and care.
The distinction between these responsibilities matters. Cancellation of a registration is a regulatory action, but it does not by itself establish criminal liability for a death. Similarly, an arrest is not a finding of guilt. The supplied report does not provide the findings of a post-mortem examination, the medical records, the investigation report or a court determination. What it does establish is that the registration of Saidul Haque was cancelled and that the child’s parents and protesting doctors are demanding accountability.
The regulatory question becomes more serious because the report describes a pattern rather than an isolated dispute. The West Bengal Medical Council has published a newspaper notice stating that the registrations of five people—Sheikh Yunus Hasan, Uttam Maity, Hafizur Haldar, Julfikar Mondal and Saidul Haque—were cancelled. The notice reportedly showed that Julfikar Mondal and Saidul Haque had the same registration number: 36442. If confirmed through the council’s records, duplicate use of a registration number would raise questions about record integrity, verification procedures and the ability of hospitals or nursing homes to check a practitioner’s credentials.
The report also says that five complaints have been lodged with Bidhannagar South police station against people described as fake doctors. The number of complaints and the number of cancelled registrations are not necessarily identical measures of the problem. A police complaint concerns an alleged offence and may involve several individuals or events. A medical council cancellation concerns registration status and professional regulation. Treating the two figures as interchangeable could obscure rather than clarify the institutional response.
The most consequential disclosure in the report is that the state is rechecking the records of people who enrolled with the West Bengal Medical Council on the basis of registrations from medical councils in other states. The exercise reportedly covers those registered since 2010 and may involve at least 6,000 records. This is not described as proof that all such registrations are invalid. It is a verification exercise prompted by the discovery of irregularities. Its importance lies in whether the process is systematic, documented and capable of distinguishing genuine practitioners from cases involving forged, duplicated or improperly used credentials.
That task places the medical council at the centre of a difficult administrative problem. Registration is the gateway through which a doctor is recognised as eligible to practise. Once a registration number is accepted, it may appear in clinic records, prescriptions, hospital documents and public-facing professional information. If the underlying record is not reliably checked, the number can give patients and institutions a false assurance of competence or legal eligibility.
The report attributes to council president Sudipta Roy a denial of the allegations against the council. He said that registrations of five fake doctors had already been cancelled and that registrations of doctors who graduated outside the state over the past decade would also be examined. The reported review therefore appears to be both a response to the current controversy and a retrospective examination of older records. The source does not provide a completion date, the criteria for selection, the number of records already checked or the action planned for registrations that cannot be verified.
The protest also reflects a question of institutional accountability. Doctors from government and private practice demanded the resignation of council president Sudipta Roy and vice-president Sushanta Roy. Images of Sudipta Roy and former council president Nirmal Majhi were displayed around the necks of two goats during the demonstration. Those protest tactics are political and symbolic; the substantive demand is whether the council’s systems allowed registrations to be issued or maintained without adequate verification.
For patients, the immediate problem is that medical credential verification is largely invisible. A person entering a nursing home or consulting a practitioner is rarely equipped to determine whether a registration number is genuine, current and linked to the person providing treatment. The burden is therefore expected to rest on institutions: regulators maintain authoritative records, healthcare establishments verify the credentials of doctors they engage, and authorities act on complaints. The supplied report does not establish which of these safeguards failed in Aranya’s case, if any. That remains a matter for the investigation and the relevant records.
The reference to registrations based on other state medical councils adds another layer. Doctors may train or register outside the state and later seek recognition elsewhere, making inter-council coordination essential. A system that relies on paper documents, fragmented databases or delayed confirmation can create opportunities for duplication or impersonation. The report does not specify how West Bengal’s registration process is conducted or whether the proposed review will use a shared digital database. It does, however, indicate that the state is examining records accumulated over a 16-year period, from 2010 onwards.
The scale of the proposed review is significant even without assuming that every record is problematic. At least 6,000 files would need to be checked, according to a Health Department source cited in the report. That creates an administrative test: the council must investigate individual credentials while continuing routine registration, renewal and disciplinary functions. It must also communicate clearly enough to prevent patients from interpreting every review as evidence of wrongdoing, while ensuring that practitioners whose records are genuinely defective cannot continue to present themselves as authorised doctors.
The case also exposes the limits of regulation after harm has occurred. Cancelling a registration can prevent future practice under that credential, but it cannot restore a life or answer all questions about treatment already delivered. The parents’ statement that their son will not return, but that they came so that no other family loses a child, captures the public-health dimension of the dispute without resolving its legal claims. Prevention depends on checks taking place before a patient reaches a practitioner, not only after a complaint or death.
At present, the evidence confirms four developments: Aranya Roy died on the day he was admitted to a Purba Bardhaman nursing home; the practitioner identified in the report as Saidul Haque has had his registration cancelled; five registrations have been publicly reported as cancelled, with one registration number appearing against two names; and a review of at least 6,000 registrations linked to other states is reportedly under way. The evidence supplied does not establish the final cause of death, the full chain of responsibility or the outcome of the police investigation.
Those unanswered questions will determine whether this becomes a narrowly defined criminal case or a wider regulatory reckoning. The next milestones are the investigation into the child’s death, the action taken on the remaining complaints and the results of the medical council’s verification of registrations issued since 2010. Until those processes produce documented findings, the central public concern remains clear: a registration system must be trusted before patients are asked to trust the people who rely on it.
