When the floods wreaked havoc in Kashmir and plunged most parts of the Valley into darkness, few doctors at a lone maternity care hospital in Srinagar, lent a ray of light to people's lives by performing birth surgeries under candlelight.

Doctors at the Lal Ded Hospital, whose ground floor was submerged by flood waters from Jhelum, performed six deliveries under the candlelight as the electricity supply to the hospital was snapped on September 6, and the generator stopped working the very next day.

"Since electricity was snapped on Saturday evening and genset stopped working as water entered into it on Sunday morning, we had to perform deliveries under candlelight later that day," Medical Superintendent, Lal Ded Hospital, Mushtaq Ahmad Rather said.

He said a team of doctors led by Head of Department (HoD), Gynaecology, Shehnaz Taing performed four normal deliveries and two Lower Segment Caesarean Section (LSCS) on six women under the candlelight on Sunday evening.

"The procedures involved high risk, but thankfully, by the grace of god, all the six babies and their mothers were fine when they were shifted from here," Rather said. The medical superintendent said the procedures were not an easy task as the oxygen supply and sterilisation set-up had been affected by the floods.