Why should every little life matter?

India has, in the recent times, lost innocent lives of young infants and in Children in Uttar Pradesh and lately in Rajasthan in what can be termed as an avoidable disaster.

These were large public hospitals operated by the Government who are not geared to meet the huge unmet demand of its citizens.  The users are from the socially and economically challenged sections of the society who cannot afford private healthcare because of prohibitive costing.  They have no choice but to access these public hospitals and the cost they end up paying is loss of their most loved ones, grief for their rest of their lives, mental agony to the parents and relatives, not to mention a huge loss to the future economy as they could become effective administrators, businessmen and professionals.  The latter is a matter of conjecture but important all the same.

Coming to the Public Healthcare Infrastructure, why is it being allowed to crumble?  Why are no masters to oversee their operations?  Is the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare or Ministry of Health, only reading numbers?  Where is there no periodic physical inspection?  If indeed there are, then what is happening to those reports? Why are the recommendations being brushed aside? Where is the lag in decision making? Why is the need to upgrade technology, infrastructure, systems and process not being given attention?  Why is it so easy to give compensation to the families who have lost their members but not divert that money to upgrading the healthcare infrastructure?  It would be interesting to find out the money paid towards compensation to such affected families and how many institutions could have been easily upgraded within that amount?

The government wants its citizens to access secondary and tertiary healthcare through its ambitious Ayushman Bharat Healthcare scheme.  Imaging if more and more citizens started accessing these already burdened hospitals, how will they get the desired level of care and treatment.  Will they not be putting themselves at additional risks to their lives? With a decrease in budget allocation for the public healthcare, the two extremes do not seem coming to a common merging point.

It will be interesting to know what is the government’s plan to ensure that no further lives, not even one life is lost henceforth and if and all it happens, who is to be held accountable and responsible?  Certainly not the medical staff for negligence because they are operating under already strained infrastructure, heavy patient load, obsolete medical technology, lack of maintenance of equipment.  It has to be the mangers and their bosses who should be held responsible and be penalised.

It is time that the Minister of Health and the respective Minister of Health at each of the State Government level take up his pledge to reduce what could be termed as “avoidable deaths” because each life is precious not because of any of the other factors stated above but purely because that every individual has the fundamental right to life and access to good quality of health care and education in addition to the other basic fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India.

Best Wishes.