Skip to main content

India and Health

     A report on infant mortality in the latest issue of “Down to Earth” magazine was a revelation to me in all sense. They have reported the worst in infant mortality rate (IMR) is a district in UP named “Shravasti”. They have reported it is the worst place to be born in entire India, where every 103 infants out of 1000 dies. They claimed that such a degradation is not lonely because of low female education but the lack of infrastructure and its geography plays an equal part. There are many districts in rural UP where, the denial and refusal of doctor’s doing their duty doesn’t affected much, thanks to the mid-wives and health centers. The report outlines the condition of health centers where babies are born, they say some uses high watt incandescent bulbs as incubators. There are many near by districts which were managed to lower IMR considerably without the help of Hospitals and Doctors. Doctors refuse to work in such rural areas where there is no basic infrastructure, many absconds when they are forced legally to work.
     As renowned economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen aforesaid, Poverty is not mainly because of the shortage but due to the lack of accessibility, our present status emphasize this fact. Here in India, our lack of Infrastructure is infamous and economists think our lack of infrastructure is like an ever tightening rope around the neck and will at one point, it breaks the neck of our country’s economy. This lack of infrastructure is the main reason why foreign investors and MNCs think twice before launching in India. Our lack of infrastructure is obvious in all respect of our economy like health, education, industry etc.

06SM_HOSPITAL_380585f rural-health
     Why is our country in a below average position in providing basic infrastructure? We only spend less than 1% of our GDP in health industry. Most low GDP countries spend more than us. Articles 38, 39(e), 41, 42 all points to the relevance of public health for the welfare of people. Right to health is the significant and more pronouncing element in present century. For the public distribution system to work properly in India we need more convincing and creditworthy civil and public servants in the system. Graft acts as a block which hinders the free flow of the system, it must be eradicated or at least we must be able to curb it. We need good and responsible candidates for the civil and public services. Past is past and we cannot redo the past so lets hope for a better future and get ready to do our bit of it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The bloodsucking Yakshi

When I was a kid, April and May fell in the list of my favourite months. Not because it's going to rain and there would be mud all around, but those are the months my cousins would be here at our family house, in our hometown in Kerala. Those are the memories I would cherish forever. My grand-mother has 5 offsprings, 4 boys and a girl. My father is the second eldest of five. Then, he was the only one staying in Kerala and everyone else was in different parts of India, a Pan-India Family one could say. We were all present, it's like Parliament, shouting, laughing, scolding children, people everywhere, busy doing their chores. An outsider entering the home can still go unnoticed. Life was less complicated then. We were just ........just ourselves. Everyone you valued dearly is with you. It's like, the world has shrunken to a square block of bricks and mortar. Now it's all feel like a fairy-tale, one of the best things about joint-family. We are all tired of day's...
Post a Comment
Read more

Goeldi-chironomous

From time immemorial we humans have been thinking that the earth is a place which God built to teach us some manners. No religious texts seemed to mention another animals specifically and importantly as we. Everything was about us. We were the center of universe. Well this study puts one more bullet hole in that theory, because scientists found out that there could be more than 1 trillion species housing this planet. And we're just one among them. Oooh that sucks! Yes that's right, you've heard me, scientists have proof for that now. This profound work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's such an amazing and groundbreaking effort by the scientific community,trying to map the biological diversity. The number of living beings shot up because this time extensive mapping of microbial life has been done. Usually people ignore the microbial diversity because they are invisible to the naked eye. The volume itself makes people's eyes pop out in amazeme...
4 comments
Read more

THE EPIC - where to draw the line?

India is the land where history and myth get intertwined in such a way that you cannot say which is which. One of India's gift to the world of literature is her majestic epical wonder " Mahabharata ", attributed to some one(might be one person or many) called Vyasa or Vyas ( Ved Vyas ) which literally means one who dissected 'Veda' (religious and philosophical writings of Hindu religion). Research on this great epic revealed that many appendage had been done to the original text , before it became whole. Mahabharata's impact on Indian psyche is so profound that people consumed every word of it as such.  Characters were being worshipped as role models, like modern day Bollywood stars. As the generations passed by, line which divides the story and reality started blurring. Stories told and retold, appended stories that were not present at the beginning happened, kind of regional versions. Many dynasties and empires came and gone everyone tried to leave t...
3 comments
Read more