Md Imtiyaz, a grocer in his mid-30s, can't get over the shock of losing his newborn daughter in the small hours of Monday due to what he called overzealous cops enforcing the lockdown.

Imtiyaz, who lives in Hindpiri’s Nizam Nagar area that is completely sealed as a Covid-19 containment zone, was stopped by the police twice when he tried to take his pregnant wife to a hospital in his car around 1am on Monday.

Finally, his wife, Nargis Parveen, had to deliver the baby at home, helped by barely women of the neighbourhood.

“The baby survived only for about half an hour,” Imtiyaz told The Telegraph on Tuesday.

His voice choking, the father added: “The nearest hospital from our home is Seva Sadan at Upper Bazar, barely 600 metres from my home. If the baby was born there, things might have been different, the child might have lived.”

Hindpiri, a large area comprising Ranchi Municipal Corporation wards 21, 22 and 23, has a population of over 80,000.

The first Covid-19 case of Jharkhand, a young woman who is a Malaysian national, was detected there.

She and some others have recovered at RIMS. But over a dozen Covid-19 cases have cropped up from Hindpiri, spurring the administration to activate a stringent lockdown of the locality.

Though attempts to communalise the disease have been rubbished by chief minister Hemant Soren, for many of those implementing the lockdown, the line between implementing health safeguards and acting on prejudices may be a thin one.

Imtiyaz said he did not imagine that police would stop his car when his wife was inside and having labour pains.

“At a Nizam Nagar gate, the police told me to go back and get permission from some senior police official. I tried to go out from another road near the Marwari College, but was stopped again by another police team who said I had to arrange an ambulance,” he said.

“Unfortunately, my wife’s labour pains were so severe that there was no time to arrange an ambulance. Couldn’t cops understand that?”

Told that Hindpiri police station officer in-charge (OC) Gyan Ranjan Singh had denied the allegations, Imtiyaz said: “The entire argument between me and the police was caught on CCTV camera of a house near Marwari College.”

He added that his wife Nargis, in her mid-20s, was in shock.

“My first wife died leaving me with a daughter, but this was Nargis's first child. There are around 12 other pregnant women in our area. I humbly request the government to ensure these mothers-to-be don’t share my wife’s fate.”

Ranchi senior superintendent of police Anish Gupta told The Telegraph on Tuesday that a sub-inspector had been suspended over the incident.