Letters: Escaping responsibility

With reference to the editorial, “Seeking accountability” (August 15), the death of children due to disruption of oxygen supply at the Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur was an index of the invisible India. But for the poverty of their parents, the children would not have died in this manner in a government hospital. Aren’t their lives as valuable as ours?
 
Hospitals turn into death traps when they do not maintain facilities, including lifesavers such as oxygen cylinders. Greater sensitivity and quicker action to ensure uninterrupted supply of oxygen could have saved the children.
 
To cite unhygienic conditions, high patient intake and the diseases having passed the curable stage as causes for the deaths is to make a vain bid to escape responsibility. It was disappointing that in his Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced no concrete measures to improve the country’s health care system. He did not assure the nation that he would revisit the large cuts in government funds for social welfare schemes. The one per cent or so of gross domestic product allocated to health care is woefully inadequate. It must be increased to four-five per cent. G David Milton   Maruthancode

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