Bengaluru, June 12: Two voters lodged a complaint against BJP candidate PM Muniraju Gowda in the Nandini Layout Police station alleging that the BJP leader has conspired to fix Congress MLA Munirathna in the voter ID storage case.

R Kumar (39) and C Anand (49) have lodged complaints separately saying that Muniraju Gowda had collected thousands of voter IDs from the voters. Those voters IDs were found in the Jalahalli SLV Park View apartment. Muniraju Gowda had threatened them to admit that the followers of Munirathna had collected the voter IDs, they alleged.

Muniraju Gowda had conducted Rangoli competition at Laggere and in the name of distributing prizes, he had distributed gold and silver ornaments and cash. In order to make sure that all the participants are from his constituency, he had collected more than thousand voter IDs, Kumar said in his complaint.

Muniraju Gowda had said that he would contest the election from the BJP and asked votes for him. In return, he promised of giving valuable gifts and returning of their voter ID cards on the day of voting near the polling station. When he opposed this, Gowda had threatened him, Kumar said.

“When the voter IDs were found in the apartment, Muniraju Gowda contacted us and asked us to mislead the police saying that the followers of Munirathna have collected the ID cards. Even he threatened us of dire consequences if we spilled the beans. So, we were silent”, Kumar said.

When people came to know that Muniraju Gowda had misused the voter IDs, they had been to the police station to give a complaint against the BJP leader. But the police declined to take the complaint, he said in his complaint.



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Lucknow/Jhansi (UP), Nov 17: Nurse Megha James was on duty when the fire broke out at the Jhansi hospital and she threw herself headlong into the rescue efforts, playing a hero's role by saving several babies.

Even when her salwar got burned, she refused to give up and was able to evacuate 14-15 babies with others' help.

"I had gone to take a syringe to give an injection to a child. When I came back, I saw that the (oxygen) concentrator had caught fire. I called the ward boy, who came with the fire extinguisher and tried to put it out. But by then, the fire had spread," James said.

Ten babies perished in a fire that broke out at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the Maharani Laxmi Bai Medical College in Jhansi Friday night.

Faced with an enormous blaze, James's mind worked with a frenetic speed, to the extent she cared little about burning herself.

"My chappal caught fire and I burned my foot. Then my salwar caught fire. I removed my salwar and discarded it. At that time, my mind was virtually not working," she told PTI Videos.

James just wore another salwar and went back to the rescue operation.

"There was a lot of smoke, and once the lights went out, we could not see anything. The entire staff brought out at least 14-15 children. There were 11 beds in the ward with 23-24 babies," she said.

Had the lights not gone out they could have saved more children, James said. "It all happened very suddenly. None of us had expected it."

Assistant Nursing Superintendent Nalini Sood praised James's valour and recounted bits from how the rescue operation was carried out.

"The hospital staff broke the glasses of the NICU ward to evacuate the babies. It was then Nurse Megha's salwar caught fire. Instead of caring for her safety, she stayed there to rescue the babies and handed them over to people outside," she said.

Sood said James is currently undergoing treatment at the same medical college. She said she did not know the extent of her burns.

"The rescued babies were shifted to a ward very close to the NICU ward… When I recall the scene, I feel like crying," she said.

Dr Anshul Jain, the head of the anaesthesiology department at the medical college, explained the standard rescue operation and claimed the hospital followed the protocol to the T.

"In the triage process during an ICU evacuation, the policy is to evacuate less-affected patients first. The rationale behind this approach is that patients requiring minimal support can be relocated quickly, enabling a larger number of evacuations to be completed in a shorter time.

"In contrast, patients on ventilators or requiring high oxygen support demand more time and resources for evacuation," he said.

"This principle was successfully implemented in Jhansi, playing a significant role in saving many lives," Jain said.

A newborn rescued from the fire died due to illness on Sunday, Jhansi District Magistrate Avinash Kumar said.