Government enacts, people react: The game goes on

Global rating agencies, keenly watching the goings on in countries across the world and more so the performance of the respective governments as a regulator resorting to enacting laws, ostensibly to keep the citizens on track, have been placing India near the bottom of the scale worked out on the basis of different sets of parameters and indices marked by professionalism. One such rating relates to the status of health (or ill-health) of the people at large in their well-marked territories. One is constrained to remark that while the agencies continue to publish their findings, perhaps free from bias of any kind, the authorities both in the land’s Central Government and their counterpart in the States as well as Union Territories give the impression comparable to the proverbial buffalo soaking in slush unfazed by being hit by the falling coconut tree frond with no sign of moving to another location.

Even as the media is faithfully and regularly informing the country’s diaspora with data and related detailed information about the disease burden they are carrying, thanks to the umpteen factors, including ignorance and callousness, India continues to host a population reeling under the different all-too-familiar major afflictions, diabetes, cancer, heart ailments, TB, Malaria and Blindness being the more obvious ones.

With a majority in the country’s population having no access to timely and appropriate medicare, for reasons not necessary to be mentioned explicitly, the gap between the quantity of resources being pumped in by the Government into the health sector and the inputs needed to improve India’s global rating on health front is yawning year on year, as reflected by the very low budgetary provision as a ratio of the nation’s GDP. The little-known fact that India is reportedly the world’s biggest vaccine producing country is mocked at by unabated number of people in vulnerable sections suffering from vaccine-preventable diseases. Mysuru district authorities of the health department are learnt to have taken an initiative on identifying risk areas in the region for such ailments.

Affordability of medicare being the ruling factor in respect of a significant proportion of the country’s population, the just-decided Union Government’s measure of pushing doctors to prescribe generic drugs, being less costly, may partly address healthcare issues. The glitch in the measure seeing  the light of the day is that while the government has enacted, the doctor fraternity have reacted adversely for many reasons that are hard to be questioned.