Gorakhpur — a sickening story of apathy

Wrapped in little more than a towel is a lifeless child being carried out of Gorakhpur hospital by a young man. His eyes convey the helplessness of families trying to cope with the loss of their young. As the death toll of the children who died at BRD Hospital over the last week mounts, reports putting it at over 70, no words will reduce the grief of these mourning families.

Death from encephalitis? For want of oxygen cylinders? Or for want of payment for the oxygen cylinders? The answer may be all of the above, as they weave together and create a deathly picture of apathy.

Bitter as it may seem, let’s face it. How important is health in a country that earmarks less than 1 per cent of its GDP for it? The National Health Policy 2017 promises to up this spending to 2.5 per cent by 2025. And though this may sound like good news, it isn’t because this has been a long-pending promise of successive governments, their political ideologies notwithstanding.

By 2025, the population will increase, hospital infrastructure is woefully inadequate even today, and let’s not even begin to unravel the shortfall of doctors and supporting medical staff. For a country with 26 million births a year, an increased spending by 2025 is not good enough. It needs to be at least 5 per cent or more because India is a country that is simultaneously home to malnutrition and lifestyle problems like obesity and diabetes; a thousand people die of tuberculosis a day and numbers dying of cancers and heart-related ailments are only increasing.

With this being the reality that reporters on health highlight incessantly, it is unfortunate that it takes the death of so many young children to pull a system out of its complacency.

The Gorakhpur incident is a tragic example of what ails hospitals in the country. The alleged non-payment of bills that resulted in oxygen cylinders reportedly falling short is not an isolated instance. Procurement is always a messy topic; speak to vendors of medicines, devices or consumables and they will tell you, completely on conditions of anonymity, how government agencies are bad paymasters, processes are corrupt and so on.

Of course in the Gorakhpur incident, it does not absolve the supplier who stopped the oxygen supply. They were not supplying to the manufacturer of some inanimate product. They were supplying oxygen to a hospital and that affects lives. But then again, health has never been a priority. And we don’t have to jog our memories too hard to recall a mass sterilisation camp in Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh) in 2014 that ended in the death of many women. (The numbers tend to distract from the core message of apathy and neglect that these incidents convey.)

In fact, earlier this year, group publication The Hindu reported that the doctor accused in this case was acquitted by the court.

In 2015, reports emerged from a Badwani district hospital in Madhya Pradesh of a cataract camp that resulted in some people losing vision in one eye. The same year, people died in a Chennai hospital due to power outage during the floods. Hospitals in New Delhi witnessed the shocking incident of a child dying from dengue and his distraught parents committing suicide. The distressing reasons leading to this being the lack of beds for patients, overwhelmed public or government-run hospitals, and expensive private hospitals.

The Gorakhpur tragedy reflects India’s worrisome track record on health, its spending, its delivery, lack of insurance support and the weak enforcement of rules on quality and governance.

Health is a state subject, but it is high time the Centre set the bar high by putting its money on health and prioritising it on the Government’s to-do list.

That can be a promise to start with, as the country marks its 70th Independence Day this week.