The owner of Cherub Angels play school in Sushant Lok-3, where three-year-old Myra had lost a part of her thumb in an accident, was arrested on Thursday. She was produced in a city court and has been granted bail.
Myra's right thumb had got crushed at the play school on April 28 and the top portion had to be amputated. In a Facebook post that has gone viral since then, the girl's mother Shivani Sharma had said that the school owner Archana Beniwal had denied the school's responsibility, saying that it was just an accident and could have happened to anyone. Sharma had filed a police complaint against the school's owners on May 10.
The incident took place on April 28, after the child was dropped off at the daycare centre at 12.30 pm, her mother Shivani Sharma said in her complaint to police. She said barely half-an-hour later, she got a call from a teacher at the daycare centre about an ‘emergency’.
Sharma said she was was informed that her daughter had hit her thumb and had been taken to a hospital. But when she reached the hospital, Sharma said she was told that her daughter’s thumb had been amputated.
“… At 1:30 pm, when I reached Artemis hospital emergency, I was told that her thumb was amputated which means her top half part of the thumb had been crushed and cut apart. I was told that another kid pushed the door close and her finger came inside. Can you believe the situation when my 3-year-old is in front of my eyes, bleeding? The resident plastic surgeon told me that nothing can be done to broken thumb but only a surgery to close the cut. Which means for her whole life she will never have a full thumb nor any nail, instead she will have a round cut finger(sic),” Sharma wrote in a Facebook post, which has been shared by more than 10,000 users.
In her police complaint, Sharma has named the owner of the centre and his wife. She said on May 1, the owner came to her residence and apologised. She said he promised to bear the expense of the treatment as it “was a mistake on their part”.
“But since then, we have not… heard back from them. When I asked… to come to Medanta to pay for my daughter’s second surgery, she started making all kinds of excuses, like she has her school to take care of…, Sharma wrote in her post.
It will take six weeks to find out if the second surgery, to reconstruct her daughter’s thumb, was successful, said Sharma. After she filed a police complaint, the owners of the daycare centre deleted their Facebook page as well as their website.