Body of doctor who fell into drain recovered on seashore

Mumbai: The body of Dr Deepak Amarakapurkar, 58, who went missing during the Tuesday torrential rains and was feared to have been sucked into a manhole was found washed up in a drain near the seashore at Worli.

Amrapurkar was a senior and respected gastroenterologist of Bombay Hospital and had been reportedly last seen by eyewitnesses while falling into an open drain on Elphinstone Road.

He had left the hospital at around 4.30pm on Tuesday for his home in Prabhadevi. After reaching Deepak Cinema in Elphinstone Road, he got off his car due to water logging, like many Mumbaikars who had to abandon their vehicles during the rains that had brought the city to a halt. He decided to walk, asking his driver to take the car home. He also called up his wife to inform her where he was, which was just 15 minutes away from his house. Though his driver reached home, the doctor did not arrive, after which a complaint was registered at Dadar police station. Various disaster control agencies had begun a massive search operation for the doctor but only found him 48 hours later washed up on the seashore.

His colleague, Dr Gautam Bhansali, a consultant physician, said he had received a call at 7.30am about a body being recovered near the Worli Village shore. The locals had called up the police when they saw the unidentified body. The police called the Bombay Hospital doctors for identification after which his family was informed. His body was sent to civic-run Sion Hospital for autopsy and then to taken for last rites. The doctor leaves behind his wife Anjali, a senior pathologist at Sion Hospital, and two children.

His colleagues and the medical fraternity had flooded social media groups with messages and photos seeking information about his whereabouts since Tuesday when Mumbai notched over 330mm rainfall — the highest since the great Mumbai floods of July 2005.

Since Thursday morning, social media was flooded with messages of condolence for Dr Amarapurkar.

Film actress Genelia D’Souza-Deshmukh tweeted: “The city where you saved a zillion lives including my father’s (TCS official Neil D’Souza) has failed you. I am so sorry as a Mumbaikar. Deeply saddened.”

The noted gastro-enterologist was a Bombay University gold medallist and had been at the helm of several national and international conferences. He had been investigator for many trials on different aspects of liver diseases. He won the Bombay University Merit scholarship and received the best research paper award for three consecutive years. He had 200 research papers to his credit and several articles published in noted journals.

His death has angered the medical community who blame the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for its negligence in not ensuring that there were no warning signs near the manhole that had been left open.

The Indian Medical Association, Mumbai Chaper, has sought an inquiry into the incident from the BMC commissioner.