India's fake doctor crisis is playing havoc with healthcare, especially in rural areas and with the poor.

With no timely action and cases stuck in courts for years, there is no end in sight nor justice delivered

- R SNEHA

When 63-year-old Raisa Beg clutched her chest in pain on a cold January morning, her son, Nabi Qureshi, barely paused to put on his shoes. Minutes later, they were racing toward the hospital, desperate for help. "We were told she would need both an angiography and an angioplasty," Qureshi recalls, his voice breaking. A junior doctor at the hospital recommended a "specialist from London" to perform the procedure. They told Qureshi that two of his mother's arteries were blocked and insisted she needed immediate angioplasty. When he asked for the angiography reports, the hospital stonewalled him for two days, citing "administrative delays." "On January 15, my mother underwent angioplasty and just 30 minutes after the procedure, she passed away," Qureshi says.