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Healthcare In India: Sick From Distorted Development

I found an Op Ed in the Albany Tribune by Graham Peebles, which is eye opening as he talks about healthcare in India,  India’s ‘growth’, “which according to him has produced umpteen rupee resplendent billionaires who live in decadent luxury in the cities”  and the many challenges that the country continues to face which include child malnutrition, poor health care facilities in rural India and severe problems of sanitation.

http://www.albanytribune.com/29112013-health-care-india-sick-distorted-development-oped/
http://www.albanytribune.com/29112013-health-care-india-sick-distorted-development-oped/

Initially, I found this article perhaps a little bleak – where he talks of “the group of city dwellers who have benefited greatly from twenty years of market liberalisation and government reforms, which have shifted support from the needy to the corporate greedy, resulting in increased levels of rural poverty and a multitude of suffering”. But then as you read on, you find that the situation is actually quite bleak.

He throws light on the inequities in health care provision, the extreme levels of inequality and social injustice pervading the country:

 

  • Although the urban population continues to grow (currently thought to be around 377 million), by most estimates 75% of the population – (a staggering 900 million people) live in rural areas, where health-care is universally appalling. It is here in relation to health, disease and mortality that statistics have meaning to the people. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), India as a whole accounts “for 21% of the worlds global burden of disease”: as a % this is greater than the population ratio. The 21% is concentrated in rural areas where diseases lead to huge numbers of deaths that, correctly diagnosed and given access to treatment, are preventable. It is thought e.g. that over 2 million deaths occurred in 2008 due to preventable causes, such as diarrhea, dengue, measles, typhoid and malaria.
  • Mahatma Gandhi who believed the soul and spirit of India rested in its village communities. He said: “The true India is to be found not in its few cities but in its seven hundred thousand villages. If the villages perish, India will perish too.” Neglected and ignored rural communities are indeed perishing.Within rural areas there is a dire lack of health care resources; human and material, including medicines as well as properly equipped Primary Health care centres (PHCs), which are the main state run facility. Although India is said to have a Universal health care system administered by the various states, who have as their “primary duty” as stated in the constitution the “raising the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and the improvement of public health”, up to 60% of the population do not have access to adequate health care provision.
  • Limited access to safe drinking water coupled with non-existent sanitation in rural India (and city slums) is a major factor in the spread of parasitic and bacterial infections, causing disease and malnutrition. Over a third of people living in villages have no access to toilets, while 50% of the population defecate in the open, added to which UNICEF, finds that “44% of mothers are disposing of their children’s faeces in the open”, resulting in “a very high risk of microbial contamination (bacteria, viruses, amoeba) of water which causes diarrhoea in children”, which is the primary cause of childhood mortality.Proper sanitation methods and clean drinking water are not an issue of concern within the high-rise middle class city developments, or the gated communities in Delhi and Mumbai: they have toilets, bidets and Evian, or some such. It is the 75% that are left without health care, with restricted access to safe drinking water and no sanitation facilities. Where has the 9% growth gone?
  • It is said that the 100 richest Indians own wealth equivalent to 25% of the national GDP (Annual GDP $1.84 trillion 2012), and, whilst Mukesh Ambani the chairman of Reliance Industries earns $18 million a year two-thirds of the population (according to the World Bank), lives on less than $2 a day. The 9% begins to rise to the divisive surface.Two decades of economic growth have granted great benefits to the Ambani’s of India, but no improvements to the lives of rural people, and in particular have effected no change to health provision. Child malnutrition for example, which at 48% (UNICEF) is the highest in the world, fell by just 1% in the years since 2001.

 

To read the entire article , click here.

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