With more than twelve women dead and another twenty critically ill after sterilization surgery, Doctor RK Gupta has become the focus of a police investigation.

Some, but not all, of the victims were operated on by Gupta who sterilized 83 women in under three hours.

The doctor is fighting accusations that he used rusty equipment and worked out of a dirty operating room at a government-run sterilization camp in the eastern Indian state of Chattisgarh.

But Gupta says he's a scapegoat and claims tainted medicine caused the deaths of the women.

(SOUNDBITE) (Hindi) DOCTOR, R.K. GUPTA, SAYING:

"I am being framed because there is pressure from above. If I am guilty, the chief medical officer is equally guilty, and he should face the same charges. All the suspended doctors should also face action. I am being framed because of administrative politics."

The state's chief minister Raman Singh says his government has now banned the medicines used at the steriliza