Jitendra, 24, who worked as an electrician in Press Apartments, a residents’ society in Delhi, died on Monday, December 15.He died abandoned by a greedy, callous, and extortionist health care system. He went from hospital to hospital in cold and smoggy December weather, only to be turned away by each place. The first stop was the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS), which was wrongly assumed to be free because of its affiliation to the government of National Capital Territory, Delhi. The hospital was going to charge, and a hefty amount too. So even though ILBS agreed to take Jitu in, his family left, unprepared for the steep charges.From there, he went to AIIMS which did not even let him into its Emergency ward. Isn’t emergency care a human right? Jitu lay breathless and burning with fever in a hired ambulance while his family, consisting of an uncle and two cousins, waited outside through the evening and well into the night. They were again there early next morning, hoping to somehow succeed this time. But the more they tried, the more they were pushed back by the hospital’s now privatised security service.In despair and feeling orphaned, the terrified family made SOS calls to me and Joseph Maliakan, a fellow resident at Press Apartments. We often turned to Joseph in any crisis and this one was serious and urgent. A desperate family seeking emergency medical attention was being ruthlessly stonewalled by a powerful hospital.Within the next half hour, Joseph was in AIIMS. He forced his way into the Emergency section, overcoming multiple obstacles and rude attendants to reach the protocol office. To quote Joseph, “I have been to the Emergency section of both AIIMS and Safdarjung countless times but never before did I have an experience as terrible as I did on December 13, 2025 when I tried to admit Jitendra. The boy needed immediate oxygen and dialysis, and we were running out of time. So I decided to sort the matter with the Chief Medical Officer, and somehow, with difficulty, reached his office.”The CMO reluctantly agreed to take a look at Jitendra. A cursory examination later, the duty doctor declined to admit Jitu.“Not one to give up easily, I decided to go to the director’s office to try and get relief for Jitu. At every step I was blocked by attendants who were rude and deliberately unhelpful. Frustrated, I then made my way to the office of the protocol officer. The wait here seemed eternal considering Jitu was deteriorating every minute. The officer arrived and expressed his helplessness in getting Jitu admitted. He suggested I meet the public relations officer in an adjacent building,” Joseph said.Joseph was helped in this monumental effort by Dr. Anoop Saraya, former head of the department of gastroenterology at AIIMS. A good Samaritan with a genuine concern for underprivileged patients, Saraya was familiar with the hospital’s dodgy and difficult bureaucracy. He suggested that Joseph meet Professor Nath for help at the protocol office. At his intervention, Jitu was taken into Emergency.The time was 11.15 am. Jitu and his family had waited five hours for this moment. But even this limited success was not to be. Barely 10 minutes into his ‘admission’, Jitu was asked to go. AIIMS said Jitu needed oxygen and the hospital’s Emergency ward did not have it. This was a rude shock to the family and to Joseph. One of the country’s biggest and best hospitals did not have oxygen!What followed was a race to neighbouring Safdarjung hospital where Jitu was put on oxygen and admitted to Emergency. But the nightmare was not over. Jitu was examined and the verdict was that he needed ventilator and dialysis support which Safdarjung claimed its Emergency ward did not have. I checked this and found out that Safdarjung is one of the best equipped hospitals in the country with extensive state-of-the-art ventilator and dialysis facilities across all departments and especially for critically ill patients.Joseph ran to the nephrology department knowing that dialysis was available there. The department said it did not have a bed but Jitu could stay in Emergency. Relief flooded in. So Jitu was not going to be thrown out? No way.Jitu’s uncle, Khemchand told me that unable to tolerate the pain that was wracking his body, his nephew cried out to him, “Mama, mujhe bachalo (Please, uncle, save me).” Jitu also complained of bullying by Safdarjung staff. They wanted him out. Minutes later, as Jitu started collapsing, doctors told the family to take him out or he would die. Desperate to save the boy, his family rushed him at 1 am, in the punishing cold, to a private hospital where he was put on ventilator.Representative image of vehicles near AIIMS in New Delhi. Photo: PTI.Jitu was a tall, wiry, and cheerful lad. He was frail from a kidney transplant he had undergone three years ago. His mother had donated a kidney and he survived the surgery. At the time, the family financed the medical expenses through crowdfunding and a paltry medical insurance. After recovery, he started working in our society where he was much loved by everyone.Ten days ago he fixed my lights and told me he had a fever. Soon it became clear that the fever was because of a severe lung infection. Jitu’s family admitted him to a private hospital whose charges turned out to be Rs 70,000 a day. Distraught, they took him out of there and started looking for affordable options.Thus began the hunt for a government hospital.Jitu travelled 30 kilometres from his home in the Khoda Colony on the Uttar Pradesh-Delhi border to ILBS and from there to AIIMS, Safdarjung, and back to AIIMS. The midnight dash to the private hospital after repeated rejection was the family’s last hope and their last option. They had no money but there was no dearth of supporters. As word spread of the boy’s plight, contributions poured in from people who knew him and loved him, and many others who only knew of him word-of-mouth. But it was too little, too late. Jitu had been set up to fail by a system that was cruelly against the poor.The constant to-ing and fro-ing, combined with hazardous levels of pollution, was too much for his young and frail body. He died after barely a day on the ventilator at the private hospital.Vidya Subrahmaniam is a senior journalist.A version of this article appeared on Facebook.