Thalassemia disrupts his civil service dreams

A rare genetic blood disorder, thalassemia major, has come in the way of 25-year-old Sukhsohit Singh to cherish his childhood dream of becoming a civil servant.

Updated on: Jun 15, 2011, 24:04:46 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A rare genetic blood disorder, thalassemia major, has come in the way of 25-year-old Sukhsohit Singh to cherish his childhood dream of becoming a civil servant.

Singh is probably the first thalassemic major patient in India to have cracked the civil service exams in 2008. As per the revised list of Union Public Service Commission, he was ranked 48. Given the rank, Singh should have been selected for the administrative services. However, the medical board constituted to test Singh declared him unfit to join civil services, attributing thalasemmia major as the reason.

The disease, called beta thaleassemia in medical terminology, means underproduction of hemoglobin — the indispensable molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen. The way to survive is regular blood transfusion and gene therapy.

“I’ve lost the count of the blood transfusions done on me,” Singh told HT.

A resident of Panchkula, Haryana, Singh has a series of academic records to his credit. He topped the Central Board for Secondary Education examination in commerce stream for the Chandigarh region and was also the topper in Masters in Public Administration in the Panjab University.

Singh cracked his UPSC exam while pursuing his doctorate in public administration in the Panjab University. Apparently for the first time, the department of personnel and training had to deal with a Thalassemic major patient.

The board of senior doctors at Safdarjung Hospital, Delhi, examined Singh in 2011 and declared him unfit to join any branch of the civil services.

General secretary of National Thalassemia Society Dr JS Arora said the decision to debar him would send a wrong message to hundreds of thalassemia patients, who want to pursue a career in administration.

Heart-broken, Singh appealed against the order. The government has constituted a new medical board at Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia hospital which has examined Singh.

Singh has fingers crossed and says, “There is no evidence to suggest that thalassaemic major affects the physical, mental, technical and administrative capabilities of a person”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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