NEW DELHI: An alarming rise in caesarean section surgeries in India, mainly in private hospitals , has come under the scanner leading to over 1.3 lakh people signing an online petition, seeking government intervention to bring in accountability and transparency in institutional deliveries.Following the petition, women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi wrote to health minister J P Nadda, suggesting to make it mandatory for hospitals to publicly display the number of c-section surgeries and normal deliveries carried out."I'd like to share my concern over alarming percentage of c-section surgeries being conducted in hospitals these days. This issue has been deeply worrying me as it has direct linkage with the health of women per se... The situation is much worse in private hospitals, which is a matter of grave concern," Gandhi tweeted on Wednesday, adding she had written to Nadda about the scale of the problem and its repercussions."We would like naming and shaming of gynaecologists who do Caesarean deliveries for no reason at all except money. I would like all women in India to get together and start protesting because a Caesarean for a woman is invasive, and turns a natural delivery into something that is an unnecessary operation," Gandhi told reportersAccording to the National Family Health Survey 2015-16, conducted in 15 states and UTs, rate of c-section surgeries in some states is as high as 87.1%, whereas the World Health Organisation (WHO) norms prescribe c-section deliveries to be at 10-15% of the total number of deliveries in the country.The petition, which was started on Change.org by Mumbai-based Subarna Ghosh, seeks to highlight the trend of hospitals and doctors pushing women towards surgical deliveries.According to a study by Chayan Roy Choudhury, a research scholar of the International Institute for Population Sciences, there is 16.7 per cent rise in c-section cases annually in India, one of the highest in the world.