The other side of the story: rural health care

Saransh from Orkut pointed me to this article.

P. Sainath is also the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought. In this article, he argues about the poor state of rural healthcare, and the fact that nobody is doing anything about it.

He starts with how the media is more concerned about Amitabh Bachhan's intestine operation, and not bothered about bringing the conditions of people in the village into sight. Well, I would say that the media is doing exactly what helps it to gain monetary benefits. It is the people who have to come forth, demand their rights, constitute a new media, and use that new media to redefine the entire system. This is exactly what the vision behind the global brain is all about.

He reinforces the fact that medical health care is one of the most important causes of rural debt, and this is because everything is privatised and people have to bear their entire expenses themselves. India has one of the lowest public sector investments in healthcare, and things like health insurance are singularly absent. Whereas private hospitals get considerable subsidies, but hardly 0.9% of the annual GDP is invested in better public healthcare facilities. I think the situation is changing slowly with the new Congress government which has pledged large sums of money to improve the infrastructure and healthcare systems, and provide employment. But will this be enough, or a better alternative is to instead bring medical facilities to the poor through private mobile ambulances, or is it to force the private hospitals to set up similar centers in the villages as well?

The situation definitely needs urgent attention, and hopefully things will improve with all the investment promises made, and other external effort like the grand challenges funded by the Gates Foundation.