Sunita Somvanshi
A 15-year-old girl from Kota, Rajasthan, died on September 1, 2026, after what her family describes as thirteen years of monitoring and appointments for cardiac surgery at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Her name was Tanvi.
She was born with a complex congenital heart condition called VSD with Pulmonary Atresia. VSD stands for ventricular septal defect — a hole between the heart’s lower chambers. Pulmonary atresia is a congenital heart defect in which the normal pathway for blood flow from the heart to the lungs is absent or severely interrupted. Together, these conditions severely restrict how much oxygen the blood can carry.
VSD with Pulmonary Atresia sits at the complex end of the congenital heart disease spectrum. In pulmonary atresia, the right side of the heart has no outlet through which blood can flow to the lungs as it should. Without surgical correction early in life, children survive by relying on alternative blood pathways — including the ductus arteriosus and aortopulmonary collaterals — that were not designed for sustained cardiac load. Over time, those compensating pathways can deteriorate, making corrective surgery progressively more difficult or, ultimately, impossible. The window for successful surgical intervention narrows significantly as a patient ages and secondary changes in the heart and lungs accumulate.
Tanvi’s family says she had been attending AIIMS for over thirteen years, with repeated outpatient appointments and consultations but no confirmed surgery date.
AIIMS tells a different story of the same timeline.
The hospital says Tanvi was first evaluated at the Cardiology OPD on October 10, 2012, where she was diagnosed with VSD with Pulmonary Atresia. During 2013, she underwent detailed evaluation — including CT Angiography, Conventional Angiography, and Cardiac Catheterisation — to assess whether corrective surgery was feasible. By 2017, the treating team had concluded that corrective cardiac surgery was not feasible given the complexity of her cardiac anatomy. She was later admitted on August 24, 2026, for evaluation for a possible heart-lung transplant — a different and far more involved procedure. In the early hours of September 1, she developed sudden fatigue, severe cyanosis with oxygen saturation falling to approximately 48 percent, and a hypoxic episode leading to cardiac arrest. Despite immediate resuscitative efforts, she could not be revived and was declared dead at 5:06am.
These two accounts differ in a material way. The family describes a failure to schedule and perform surgery. AIIMS says surgery was evaluated and later ruled out on clinical grounds, with a transplant being the next step under consideration. The inquiry now underway will examine which account reflects what actually happened in her medical records.
AIIMS has constituted a committee, directed by the Director of the institute, to review the sequence of events, clinical records, investigations, treatment provided, and the circumstances surrounding her death. An autopsy is also underway. The institute said it would await both the committee’s findings and the autopsy report before drawing final conclusions.
The inquiry’s scope is significant. It is not limited to the clinical decisions about surgery — it also reviews bed allocation workflows and ICU procedures during her final admission. This means the committee is examining not just medical judgment but operational capacity: whether any delay in accessing ICU resources during her deterioration is part of the record. That is a separate question from whether surgery was correctly ruled out in 2017.
The outcome of that inquiry has not been released.
Tanvi’s story is not unique in its geography or its logistics. AIIMS receives referrals from across northern India — patients whose conditions require specialist care that is either unavailable or unaffordable in their home states. Families often travel long distances and then stay near the hospital for extended periods, waiting for appointments, test results, or dates. Some stay in shelters or covered passages near the campus because they cannot afford accommodation in Delhi.
Until the inquiry releases its findings, the accurate framing remains: the family alleges years of missed opportunity; AIIMS says surgery was ruled out on medical grounds; an investigation is underway to establish the facts.
