The scene in the gloomy room where 83 women were sterilized last weekend is repeated routinely at makeshift contraception clinics across India: bloodstained sheets that aren't changed between patients, and hasty two-minute surgeries.
Only this time, something went tragically wrong.
More than a dozen of the mostly poor and illiterate villagers operated on by Dr. R.K. Gupta have since died, and scores remain sick in hospital, many of them in intensive care.