The Contrast Between India And Bharat 

Mahesh Vijapurkar

Just let these three instances sink in.

# 1. Vilasrao Deshmukh, Maharashtra Chief Minister was flown in an air ambulance to Chennai, where he later unfortunately expired. He had liver cancer.

# 2. Kerala Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, recently underwent a “routine health check” up in a Chennai hospital.

# 3. Goa Chief Minister, Manohar Parrikar checks into a Mumbai hospital for his treatment and later, flies to the United States to deal with his undisclosed ailment.

# 4. Sonia Gandhi had done the same – gone to the US and the nature of her ailment and the hospital where she was treated are kept under wraps.

Contrast it with the following:

# 1. A pregnant woman, in labour, is denied an ambulance to reach a hospital in Udhampur, forced to use a private ambulance, finds that the hospital had no doctor to attend on her for three hours. The baby died in the womb. The baby is taken back in a carton.

# 2. After the tragic deaths of commuters in the stampede at the Elphinstone Bridge in Mumbai, the dead had numbers inscribed on their foreheads with a sketch pen, drawing the ire of the High Court for heaping indignity on the dead.

# 3. A person has his amputated foot used as a pillow in a Jhansi hospital.

# 4. From Patna, a father had to carry his dead 9-year- old child on his shoulder because he didn’t get an ambulance to take her to the village. And the formalities – like what Munnabhai protests about in the movie – to admit her had taken time despite the urgency.

The two sets of episodes tell a striking but appalling story about our healthcare system tilted in favour of the rich or the powerful, and actually, one with the other are both. What galls is that chief ministers have to seek medical help outside their state, underscoring the inadequacies in their own, which they rule.

Recently, Amitabh Bachchan had a team of doctors flown – rushed is the word – to Jaipur to deal with his shoulder pain. For such super rich, nothing is beyond their pale. They make headlines and the common man continues with his woes. The woes of the likes of us can continue be longer than an arm. In fact, endless.

Except, the likes of the two sets of instances narrated here, make headlines, treated as normal, and the country moves on to its next set of incidents that sharply shows the disparities. What is to be noted that while in office, the political worthies apparently haven’t done much to improve the healthcare system in their States to preclude them from seeking it elsewhere.

Apparently, because they are rich and powerful, and the agonies of the common man are not felt by them. The shoe does not pinch them at all, and some incremental but nominal improvement in the publicly funded hospitals is good statistics. It has to be pointed out that humans too are seen as statistics. Apart from anguish and anger, this provokes little from else from the hoi polloi. They know the worthies had sought out private hospitals in India – before some fly out overseas like Parrikar and Sonia have – which in itself their utter lack of confidence in public-funded healthcare. It should stare us in the face that they know they have not done enough to improve it.

Even the Rs 5 lakh per annum insurance now announced for 10 crore families, given this background, is suspect because the private sector has been gaming facilities. Even the segments set aside for the poor in hospitals built on public land and run as corporates are denied them. Those who cannot afford them, which includes the rising middle class, are between a rock and a hard place.