The Man Who Once Ran "Save the Girls" Is Now Accused of Ending Them

The Access That Was Supposed to Protect Daughters Became the Access That Ended Them

Imagine designing a campaign to stop female foeticide. You need someone who understands how sex-determination rackets actually operate, who has credibility with doctors and clinics, who can move through the state health bureaucracy without raising suspicion.

You need, in other words, exactly the profile of a district civil surgeon like Dr. Chandrakant Gunda Gaikwad - which is precisely why he was recruited into Maharashtra's "Save the Girls" campaign. That same profile, retirement freed of institutional oversight, is what police now allege let him run an underground abortion ring for years, admitting to 200 to 250 illegal terminations.

Sit with that for a moment before reaching for a framework. This isn't simply "a doctor broke the law." The specific discomfort here is that the very qualities that made him useful to the state's protective mandate - insider medical knowledge, institutional trust, a reputation that discouraged scrutiny - are the same qualities that made him dangerous once his intentions inverted.

Vetting a protector for competence and access cannot, by itself, guarantee they remain a protector.

Where Fiduciary Duty Actually Breaks

A civil surgeon holds what ethics calls a fiduciary role: the state and the public extend trust precisely because verifying every action would be impossible and impossible-to-verify trust is what public office fundamentally runs on.

Gandhian trusteeship frames this as a moral obligation to hold power for the vulnerable, not merely without formal violation. The Gaikwad case shows this obligation breaking exactly where oversight is weakest - not at entry (he was vetted, credentialed, publicly endorsed) but in the years of unmonitored practice and especially after retirement removed even the institutional structures that existed.

What This Means for Institutional Design, Not Just Individual Character

The easy response is to treat this as one man's moral failure and move on. That misses the actual lesson: any system that grants trusted insiders unsupervised access to exactly the vulnerable population it exists to protect will eventually produce this outcome, because vetting for competence is not the same as building ongoing accountability. The reform question isn't "how do we screen better protectors"

• it's "how do we design continuous oversight that doesn't depend on trusting insiders not to misuse the exact access their role requires." For the exam, this is the difference between an answer that names "conflict of interest" as a term and one that shows precisely how a protective mandate, absent structural accountability, converts into cover for the harm it was created to prevent.