Unhealthy politics

Kota tragedy shows why states should get priorities right

Rajasthan Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot was bang on when he said on Saturday that there was no point blaming the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government for the unimaginable tragedy in the J K Lon government hospital in Kota. Mr Pilot had an obvious reason to take a dig at his own party’s government in Rajasthan, but he should know that a political blame game as usual will lead nowhere. Over 100 children have died in the hospital over the past month for reasons that mostly have to do with lack of basic equipment — cannulas, ventilators, infant warmers — and callous medical staff and administration. These reasons mirror those that caused the serial deaths of children, mostly from encephalitis, in Baba Raghav Das Medical College in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 2017 and the acute encephalitis syndrome outbreak in Bihar, killing over 150 children.

These incidents should have led to a nationwide audit of facilities at public hospitals, but politicians opted for what they do best: More politicking. Some FIRs were filed against senior medical staff members but a year later, ground reports stated that the hospital had not upgraded or expanded facilities. Significantly, it had stopped issuing health bulletins altogether. In the case of the Kota facility, the health minister has alluded to allocations for an expansion of beds when the Congress was in power before 2013, but the money does not appear to have been spent under the successor BJP government (2013-18). Meanwhile, the Centre has dispatched a team to investigate the causes of this high death rate.

The script is all too familiar. But unfortunately, it does nothing to break the disheartening chain of corruption and negligence that occurs in the public health sector across the country. It is worth noting that in Kota, Gorakhpur, and Bihar, the victims were from poor and marginalised families who could not afford the relatively well-equipped but more expensive private hospitals. Yet in at least two, priority has been focused on headline-grabbing schemes such as loan waivers and associated freebies rather than on the basics — health and education. The case of Rajasthan is particularly ironic because the Congress manifesto for the 2018 Assembly elections had promised to bring in a Right to Health Bill if it came to power. Far from fulfilling this commitment, the new government has neglected its health programme. The 2019-20 state Budget made a marginal increase in allocation for health and the sector’s share in state expenditure dropped from 6.16 per cent to 5.97 per cent. Funds for the state health insurance scheme launched by the previous BJP government, as well as expenditure on free medicine and diagnostics, have been reduced.

There are still no signs of the promised “Janata Clinics” that were to be modelled on the lines of the Aam Aadmi Party government’s “Mohalla Clinics” in Delhi, though the state announced loan waivers to some 1.9 million farmers — a move that has long proven unproductive in terms of relieving agricultural distress in the long run. At number 29, the state’s ranking in the national Human Development Index is not much to write about, and it falls way below the national average. If Mr Pilot wants to act on his assertion, he would do well to reset his state’s priorities to ensure that the poorest citizens do not die for lack of basic health care.