A government run sterilization program in the Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh state in central India cost eight women their lives and sent dozens more to local hospitals.

The Daily Mail is reporting that eight women died and more than 60 were injured during a mass sterilization drive at a government run “family planning camp” last Saturday. A single doctor and his assistant performed 83 tubectomies in just five hours.

By Monday morning, reports of health problems in women who underwent the surgeries were pouring into government offices. Problems involved sudden drop in pulse rates, vomiting, and other ailments.

“Since Monday, eight women have died and 64 are in various hospitals,” said Sonmani Borah, the commissioner for Bilaspur district where the camp was held.

Although the cause of death for the eight women has not been determined, the women were said to have been vomiting before they died.

The government insists there was no negligence involved.

“There was no negligence. He is a senior doctor. We will probe (the incident),” a chief medical officer told a local newspaper. “As of now, the government has not found any evidence of negligence.”

Even though India claims the sterilization program is voluntary, women are paid an incentive of 1,400 rupees ($23) to have the surgery. In addition, health care workers get 200 rupees ($3.20) for bringing a woman to the camp to be sterilized.

Health care in the camps is known to be inadequate with rushed surgical procedures performed on women in unhygienic conditions. The Indian government attracted worldwide condemnation last year after news footage showed dozens of women, still unconscious from anesthesia, dumped in a field beside the hospital because there was not enough room in the facility to care for them properly.

“Health advocates worry that paying women to undergo sterilization at family planning camps is both dangerous and, by default, limits their contraceptive choices,” the Mail reports.

Health care experts, such as Kerry McBroom, director of the Reproductive Rights Initiative at the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi agree. “‘The payment is a form of coercion, especially when you are dealing with marginalized communities.”

Sadly, deaths due to sterilization are not new in India. As the Mail reports, more than four million women were sterilized in India last year alone. Between 2009 and 2012, the government paid compensation to the families of 568 women who died from the procedure.

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