The protests against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) have entered the second month. Groups of women, people from Muslim communities, students from well known universities have all joined these protests at some point or the other and the protests are relentless. In the initial stages of these protests BJP ruled states saw unprecedented police brutality. Every day news would be rife with reports of a new method of police excess. One of these reports was of Mangaluru where not only did the police fired bullets at protestors but also entered Highland Hospital and hit people with batons and tried to bash down doors of intensive care unit. The police even resorted to tear gas shelling.

The protest was taking place at some distance from the hospital and the protestors injured in the police firing were brought to Highland Hospital with bullet injuries. The police arrived at the hospital sometime later, and then went on their rampage. All of this was captured on the hospital’s CCTV cameras, and played widely across news media.

The police had done the same in a confined space of a library of Aligarh Muslim University which was also widely condemned. The use of tear gas in a hospital, where no one was protesting is something that India has not witnessed, not on civilians at least.

The Mangaluru Police seems to have taken inspiration from Hong Kong police who resorted to a similar kind of brutality on its protestors, about a month before the Mangaluru incident. At least the HK police used tear gas outside the hospital where protestors had gathered and the smoke had entered the hospital premises. Mangaluru went a step further and did shelling within the premises.

This incident is only one of the many such shocking incidents of police action where students have been attacked, activists and locals beaten up and detained, medical care denied to those injured, many a times ambulances were also attacked and medical professionals were injured in this fight of masses versus the State.

A source at Highland Hospital confirmed that the police used tear gas in the hospital four times and that patients had to be shifted to the ICU (Intensive care Unit) because of breathing difficulty. The source said on the condition of anonymity, “The way the police handled the situation, it was unacceptable”. The management of the hospital even sent a written complaint to the police to investigate the matter and to conduct proper investigation in this regard. A month has passed since the terrifying incident and yet no inquiry has begun neither has any final report been filed by the police.

The support of the medical community has been commendable in all this mayhem. The Hippocratic oath asks that doctors treat all people to the best of their abilities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands that, even in conflict, people have access to a good standard of health care.

Doctors in Delhi have even gone to site of protests to give medical aid to injured protestors and have demanded the police to allow them to treat the injured detainees. All this is being done while the medical professionals, the support staff put themselves in danger as there have been incidents of ambulances being attacked and vandalised thus injuring the medical staff.

Ambulances have also not been let to pass by rallies in support of the contentious and discriminative law. One such incident took place when BJP’s West Bengal State President, Dilip Ghosh, who is also notorious for making controversial statements and hate speech, refused to let an ambulance on duty to pass through the rally that he was addressing. By contrast, when ambulances wanted to get through thousands of protestors in Delhi, Karnataka, and Kerala, the crowds parted swiftly to let the vehicles through.

The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has also condemned police action in its press statements. These statements say that the violence on doctors and nurses is a “barometer of anarchy”, that hospitals should remain “safe zones”, and that the Indian Government has “no right to deny anyone their right of access” to health care.

The lethal combination of CAA-NRC seeks to ultimately disenfranchise the poor and marginalised and also the Muslim community. Those who are not able to prove their citizenship will be put in detention camps, as is being predicted seeing Assam as a case study. Assam has 6 detention centres where about 970 people have been detained and live a miserable life.

The processes of National Register of Citizens and detention have unsurprisingly led to enormous mental trauma resulting in suicides and deaths. A member of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) team who visited those in detention spoke of the “environment of intense, permanent sadness…. It was as though everyone was in mourning”.

The British Medical Journal’s (BMJ) Indian community has appealed the government to “repeal the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and stop the nationwide implementation of the National Population Register and National Register of Citizens immediately”; and has also called upon the nation-wide medical fraternity to be alert to the danger of a public health emergency as a consequence of this (NRC) exercise.

Related:

Sikh-Muslim friendships started with Guru Nanak Dev Ji
After Kerala, Punjab Assembly passes resolution against CAA
Women gather at Agripada in thousands; show way against CAA-NPR-NRC
CAA-NPR-NRC protests cut across all religious and communal divides
Kolkata Muslim resident threatened with Hindutva rant at home

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With 75 districts, 814 blocks and 97,607 villages, UP is larger, by population, than all but five countries.  It holds the key to political dominion over India, but, in terms of health and nutritional outcomes, infrastructure and coverage indicators, it is widely considered a laggard, improving slowly, with wide disparities within.
 
The per capita public expenditure on health (by both Centre and states) is the lowest in UP among the five states with 169 million voters going to polls between February 4 and March 8, 2017, our analysis shows.
 
Goa, a state with less than 1% of UP’s population, spends more than five times more, per capita, on its citizens’ health. UP’s average spending is 70% of the Indian average. As we will see, this low spending leads to fewer doctors, nurses and paramedics in healthcare institutions, leaves one in two children without full immunisation, 14% of the state’s households faced with “catastrophic” health expenditure, higher than 25% of total household spending, and a health insurance coverage of 4.2%, compared to the Indian average of 15.2%.
 
With health increasingly important to economic progress, this is the second of a six-part series that  uses the latest available data to discuss the state of health and nutrition in Uttar Pradesh, Manipur, Goa, Punjab and Uttarakhand.
 

 
Not enough doctors, hospitals = poorer health outcomes
 
In Uttar Pradesh, doctors accounted for more than half of all health workers, the highest such proportion in the country, according to this 2016 World Health Organization study, probably a result of not having enough other health workers in the first place. UP also had the lowest share of female health workers, 19.9%, compared to the Indian average of 38%.
 
For example, most of the 30 Indian districts ranked lowest in terms of density of nurses were located in UP, with some also located in Bihar and Jharkhand. UP, which had 16.16% of the country’s population, had only 10.81% of overall health workers. Although numbers based on the latest census data–as yet unanalysed–may have improved partly because of improvement due to the 11-year-old National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), UP’s overall rankings are likely to be unchanged, given that UP still has a 50% shortfall of the nursing staff at primary health centres (PHCs) and community health centres (CHCs).
 
The latest government data on UP’s government hospitals are not promising.
 
CHCs in UP are 84% short of specialists, according to the Rural Health Statistics, 2016. PHCs and CHCs, taken together, have only half the staff they should have. Although all PHCs have doctors, one in three PHCs does not have a lab technician.
 
Of 36 Indian states and union territories, UP was third from the bottom in terms of infant mortality rate (IMR, deaths per 1,000 live births) across rural and urban areas, the latest Sample Registration System bulletin for 2015, released in December 2016, showed. Many relatively poor states do much better than Uttar Pradesh.
 

UP has India’s second-highest maternal mortality rate (MMR, deaths per 100,000 births), according to government data. UP also has the lowest sex ratio at birth among bigger Indian states, barring Haryana, according to 2014 SRS data, the latest available.
 
Over the last decade, UP’s IMR was higher than the national average, across genders. Although the overall IMR has improved from 73 in 2005 to 46 in 2015, the gap between UP’s IMR and the India IMR remains large, as the following figure shows.
 
UP is among the few Indian states where the mean age at marriage for women is still below the legal age of marriage of 18, data from the Rapid Survey on Children (RSoC) 2013-14 showed, pointing to the need to fight child marriage to improve the high IMR and MMR in the state.
 

Source: Sample Registration System bulletin
 
Deaths that don’t trigger debates
 
UP reports more than 75% of Japanese encephalitis (JE) cases reported nationwide. In 2016, of 1,277 Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) deaths reported in India, 615 were in UP, as were 73 of 275 reported JE deaths nationwide. However, even in areas of eastern UP, where JE/AES kill people year after year, such deaths have not been an election issue.
 

Source: National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme. *Figures for 2016 are provisional.
 
Uttar Pradesh has the lowest birth-registration coverage in India
 
Legal identity is a fundamental human right. A child who is not registered at birth is in danger of being denied the right to an official identity, a recognised name and a nationality, as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) observed. The UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs)–which India has signed on to achieve–recognise this, and SDG target 16.9  exhorts that by 2030, all member countries should provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.
 
The overall level of registration of births in India has increased to 88.8% in 2014 from 85.6% in 2013, according to the latest available data, and 16 states/union territories achieved registration of all births, by 2014.
 
This birth-registration progress has eluded UP, which registers no more than 68.3% of all births. If one avoids official statistics and looks at third-party surveys, such as the RSoC 2013-14 , UP’s registration of births is among the lowest at just 39.1%, while the national average is 71.9%.
 

 
UP–along with Bihar–is often accused of pulling down the national average on registration of births.
 
Until 2016, the Civil Registration System (CRS) reports had a separate India analysis that used the term “excluding UP and Bihar” to indicate India’s progress.
 
Why UP citizens spend their own money on healthcare than most other states
 
UP spends Rs 488 on the healthcare of each citizen every year, according to recent research by Brookings India, a think tank, based on the latest government data available (71st round of National Sample Survey Office data). That is higher only than Bihar and Jharkhand, and just 26% of Rs 1,830 that Himachal Pradesh spends.
 
With health-insurance reaching 4% of UP’s 200 million people (the all-India average is 15%), and gaps in public infrastructure, more people depend on private facilities for out-patient healthcare than any other state, barring Bihar and Haryana.
 
Human-resource gaps in the public sector contribute substantially to high out-of-pocket (OOP) spending by UP households. With low state spending and predominance of private healthcare sector, 80% of all health spending is done by households themselves, lower only than Kerala, West Bengal and Odisha, according to Brookings research.
 
This is the second of a six-part series. You can read the first part here.
 
Next: More Wasted Children, Anaemic Men, Women Than Before In Once Robust Punjab
 
(Kurian is Fellow at Observer Research Foundation’s Health Initiative.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 
 

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When patients from all over India fail to get a healthy treatment, All India Institute of Medical Science, Delhi (AIIMS) always comes to rescue. But what if people remain untreated just because ‘cashless’ situation comes in way?

Shiv Kumar Paswan, a 70 years old kidney patient from Chapra-Bihar, is in Delhi for last 3 months but his life has worsened over the past 30 days. Since he has ended up with whatever money he had, he had to take up the option of loan for the interest 10 percent of total amount, and that has added up to 2 to 3 lakh already. Now Shiv is waiting for more than a week outside the emergency ward with no required money to get treated. He said- “I need around 5,000 each day for my treatment and now I have nothing, I am soon going to die.”

Mukesh Kumar, who is the only attendant with Shiv Kumar, said, “ we are from poor family and having no bank account either, earlier at least money was available on high interest rate, but now, even those people also refusing to lend at any rate. People like us have fallen into trap and are on verge of collapse.” he concluded with a quivering voice.

Mukesh Kumar Paswan and Shiv Kumar Paswan waiting outside the emergency of AIIMS

Since its establishment, 6 decades ago, AIIMS has been the Mecca for medical patients across the country. And this drove Mawarlal Jatav and his wife from Madhya Pradesh to get treated his eye in OPD this weekend. However, he claimed the recommendation letter of JyotiradityaeScindia which will help him from any financial barrier. He said, “Our Babuhas did this, keeping cashless situation in mind, yet we’re facing great problems when buying food with limited cash.”

Mawar Lal Jatav with his wife

Everyone is not lucky enough and DinkarYadav, a Lucknow resident, is definitely not among them. He is roaming around AIIMS for his father’s surgery and has to rush back home twice since the announcement of invaliding banknotes of 500 as well as of 1000. He says, “I was carrying 15 thousand of cash mostly of 1000’s note, but unexpectedly I have to way back home to carry all the necessary stuffs for surviving. I even carried grocery to save my little exchanged cash”. He further says, “it’s a great relief that hospital is accepting old notes, but for medicines, I have to spend those new one as I have no ATM card either”.

Zarina, an elderly patient from Saraharpur is in AIIMS for an operation to remove her kidney stone. She says, “I am paying very little and it is a great relief for poors like us, but my son is facing severe difficulties in living with me, although he has ATM card and but every day he has to spent many hours in search of cash in ATM machines and many times he fails in bringing cash.”

Other than migrated patients, locals too are facing different kind of problems.Rahul Kumar said he along with his mother is moving up and down from Indeapuri to AIIMS for more than 20 days. His brother is admitted for treatment of lungs. “I am the only earning member in my family and I am solely responsible for arranging all the finance. Since demonitisation, it has become really tough to mobilise cash even though I have my own bank account. Especially standing in long queues outside ATM in such hectic schedule is not an option.” he concluded.

However, the level of inconvenience is not same for everyone. Another vegetable vender from Tughlaqabad, has been lying outside emergency ward for a week. Mobeen Yusuf is suffering from leg injury. He said he has 5 kids and all are school going. “I was earning nothing less than 3,000 with sufficient profit per day, but after Prime Minister’s decision to invalidate the banknotes of 500 and 1000, I am hurt most, my sale has dropped drastically and debt is rising. My family is ending with the past savings and I am earning no more. No one cares for people like us” he further said.

It’s not only patients at AIIMS who are suffering but the businessmen associated with these patients are equally depressed. My sale has dropped by half since demonitisation. Earlier my customer were buying my chat plates worth Rs.20 but now most of the customers have shifted to plate of Rs.10” said Manvir Yadav, a snacks vender outside AIIMS gate. He further adds, “I don’t know what will be the impact of this decision of invalidating certain currencies but I am sure, my business will ruin in few days.”

Manvir Yadav selling his snacks outside the AIIMS gate

The drug shops outside the AIIMS gate are one of the biggest drug providers to patients and their business largely runs through their purchase. On the promise of anonymity, a drug seller said, “I am really irritated to see big notes of 2,000. We already had scarcity of small banknotes like 50 and 100 but now we are mentally depressed. Because of new banknotes, our trade is dropping, we are forced to refuse. Many customers, when having no smaller notes to give, return their purchase.”

Medical shops outside the AIIMS

Another drug seller in the row said, “We are not accepting old banknotes but offering card swipe machine for digital payments. However, using this adds up extra financial cost to us and I am forced to pay additional amount to my bank for using this machine, when my business already dropping.

Meanwhile, the degree of inconvenience is varying between those plastic money holders and those whose lives run mostly on cash.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author's personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Newsclick

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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क्या है मामला
बता दें कि छतरपुर शहर के सिटी कोतवाली थाना क्षेत्र के बसारी दरवाजा संकटमोचन मार्ग पर देर रात 25 वर्षीय गफ्फार S/O बहादुर खान की मौत हो गई थी। लेकिन जब सोमवार सुबह सफाईकर्मी सफाई कर रहे थे, तो तिराहे पर दुकान के चबूतरे पर मृतक का शव पड़ा मिला। 
 

 
इस मामले कि जानकारी लोगों ने इसकी जानकारी पुलिस को दी। हालांकि पुलिस मौके पर पहुंच गई थी, लेकिन उसे पोस्टमार्टम के लिए ले जाने के लिए एम्बुलेंस नहीं मिली। बता दें कि पुलिस की प्रारंभिक जांच में खुलासा हुआ है युवक शराब पीने का आदी था। शायद किसी वाहन की टक्कर के बाद वो चबूतरे पर बैठ गया होगा। गहरी चोट और ठंड के कारण उसकी मौत हो गई।
 

 
मृतक के भाई के मुताबिक
मृतके के भाई का कहना है कि, हम सुबह 6 बजे से 11 बजे तक एम्बुलेंस का इंतजार करते रहे, लेकिन किसी ने मदद नहीं की। तब हम रिक्शे में भाई का शव पोस्टमार्टम के लिए ले गए। वापस भी रिक्शे पर लाए।
 

 
मामले पर CMHO का कहना 
पूरे मामले पर CMHO वीके गुप्ता ने एम्बुलेंस न मिलने के सवाल पर दो टूक कहा कि, शहर क्षेत्र में यह व्यवस्था नगरपालिका की है। जिला अस्पताल का इसमें कोई रोल नहीं है। उनके पास शव वाहन नहीं है।

Courtesy: National Dastak
 

The post ये है एमपी की स्वास्थ्य सेवाओं का हाल, कचरे के रिक्शे में पोस्टमार्टम के लिए ले जानी पड़ी लाश appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The primary health centre at Melkote, in Mandya district, Karnataka, has only one doctor–to serve 20,000 people across 33 villages. The number of medical colleges and seats have almost doubled in India over the past decade. But the doctor-patient ratio in even the most prosperous states, home to the majority of India’s private medical colleges, is still way off the WHO requirement of 1:1,000
 
Anyone who falls critically ill in Melkote on a Sunday has only one option–to take the ambulance parked at the PHC to the closest hospital 23 km away, in Pandavapura talukasubdivision.
 
For a decade now, Dr Harsha D has been treating every sick person in this rural pocket, commuting 120 km between the centre and his home in Mysuru. “I wish there was another hospital in the vicinity and more doctors too,” he said.
 
Melkote is not some remote, poor village in an ailing state. It sits in Mandya district, just 100 km south-west of the state capital, Bengaluru. This is an agriculturally prosperous district with a literacy rate of 70.4%. Its per capita income of Rs 114,270 is well above national average of Rs 93,293. And 70% of its villages boast of a human development index above the state average of 0.4392.
 

 
Melkote itself boasts of lush fields and agro units, and the incomes of its residents are rising. But it still doesn’t have 24×7 access to basic healthcare. Its troubles are representative of one of India’s biggest failures–that a country with an 8% growth in gross domestic product (GDP) still cannot provide the essential healthcare to its citizens.
 
Here is a bigger irony: Karnataka ranks number three among states that produce the most number of doctors every year in India. But Mandya’s doctor-patient ratio of 1:20,000 is closer to that of backward states such as Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The World Health Organization (WHO) standard is 1:1,000.
 
An analysis by IndiaSpend revealed that, between 2007 and 2014, the southern states added more doctors to the national talent pool than other regions. Tamil Nadu added 23,754 doctors, Karnataka 25,432, Kerala 9,406 and Andhra Pradesh 15,233. This is a third of the total number of doctors added by all states across the country during the period.
 

Source: National Health Profile, 2015, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare
 
But none of these states have doctor-patient ratios that are anywhere close to the ideal. Karnataka, for instance, ranks number 10 among the worst performers on this parameter and Andhra Pradesh, number 5.
 
Shortage of doctors; disparity between states
 
Despite government investment, India could add only 2.07 lakh doctors between 2007 and 2015. The requirement is for another 3 lakh. IndiaSpend had earlier reported how India is faced with shortage of 5 lakh doctors.
 
Data analysis showed that it would take India another decade to come up to the WHO standard.
 
Of the 9.3 lakh doctors in the country, only 1.06 lakh work for the government. This means there is one government doctor for every 11,528 people, according to the National Health Profile 2015 report.
 
Even if we add private doctors to the tally, the doctor-patient ratio only moves up to 1: 1,319, still lower than the WHO limit, 75% lower than Argentina, and 70% lower than the US, according to data from World Bank.
 
There are states that fare worse than the average–in Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, one doctor serves more than 25,000 people.
 

Source: National Health Profile, 2015, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare
 
Bihar, which has the worst doctor-patient ratio, could add only 3,179 doctors in seven years. It would take it another 140 years to make it to the WHO standard.
 
Medical college seats double, but all concentrated in south, west
 
The number of doctors available can be directly linked to the number of its medical colleges in the country. Data collected over the past 10 years show an impressive growth in number of colleges and seats, with almost 18 more colleges added each year and the number of seats doubling.
 
As of October 2016, there were 422 medical colleges with 57,000 medical seats across the country. However, 60% of them are concentrated in six states and one union territory–Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat and Pondicherry–covering 50% of the medical seats in India, according to ministry of health & family welfare data.
 
In contrast, in states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Assam where there is greater need for medical help, the number of colleges is less.
 
Private colleges outnumber govt ones
 
Most of the colleges added over the last decade, however, were private. Today, private colleges (224) outnumber government medical colleges (198).
 
But medical education entrepreneurs seem to be steering clear of the northeast–there are none in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland. Sikkim has one.
 

Source: Rajya Sabha answers: 2016 and 2006
 
“Medical education is a thriving business. But private investment in medical education is concentrated in the southern states, and in Maharashtra. It’s not lucrative in backward states,” said Deoras Kiranshankar of the Indian Medical Association. “Second, private medical colleges are bringing in rich students who show little willingness to work in rural areas. Many of them go abroad.”
 
The government needs to intervene, he said, opening more affordable medical institutions. Kiranshankar cited Chhattisgarh, with five government medical colleges and only one private college, as the ideal that other states needed to emulate.
 
India continues to spend little on health
 
India’s poorer states have health indicators that are worse than those of many nations poorer than them. This is not surprising because health expenditure as a share of India’s GDP has not improved in the last two decades–it was 1.1% of the GDP in 1995 and it only rose to 1.4% in 2014.
 
The Twelfth Five Year Plan and the draft health policy in 2015 have committed to an increase in public expenditure on health–to 2.5% of the GDP.
 
Among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations, India spends the least on health.
 
The result is that that 89.2% of the health expenditure in India is private (out-of-pocket), according to this 2014 World Bank report. It was 91.4% in 1995. Out-of-pocket expenditure is the share of expenses that patients pay to the healthcare provider, without a third party insurance or government-subsidised treatment.
 
In 2011-12, the share of out-of-pocket expenditure on health care as a proportion of total household monthly per capita expenditure was 6.9% in rural areas and 5.5% in urban areas, according to the National Health Policy-2015 report of the ministry of health and family welfare.
 
This has led to an increasing number of households shouldered with health costs: 18% of all households in 2011-12 from 15% in 2004-05.
 
In India, to finance hospitalisation costs, “rural households are primarily dependent on household income/savings (68%) and less on borrowings (25%), whereas urban households rely more on income/saving (75%) and lesser (18%) on borrowings”, noted Thayyil Jayakrishnan, department of community medicine, Government Medical College, Kozhikode, in his research paper.
 
The Indian healthcare industry, which remained strong even during the recession of 2008–when it was valued at Rs 3 lakh crore–is projected to grow to Rs 18 lakh crore by 2020, according to industry body India Brand Equity Foundation.
 
Why rural India still travels to town for medical help
 
Melkote’s inadequate medical infrastructure is visible across Indian villages. Two-thirds of the country lives in villages, but most doctors are concentrated in urban areas which already have good medical infrastructure. In PHCs across India, only 27,355 allopathic doctors were posted in rural areas; 79,060 were working in towns and cities, data from two years ago show.
 
Union health minister J P Nadda has acknowledged this divide. Answering a question in the Rajya Sabha on doctors’ reluctance to serve in rural areas, he said that the feeling of professional isolation and a disparity in the living conditions between towns and villages were the primary reasons.
 
He maintained that the number of doctors posted in PHCs in rural areas has risen from 22,608 in 2007 to 27,355 in 2014, marking a slow improvement.
 
PHCs in rural areas are short of more than 3,000 doctors, the scarcity rising 200% (or tripling) over 10 years, IndiaSpend reported in February 2016.
 
But, government efforts lack in scale, resources, training and financial outlay: Around 25% of the sanctioned posts for doctors in PHCs and 66% of specialist posts in Community Health Centres are lying vacant, according to a rural health statistics report.
 

Source: Rural Health Statistics, 2014-15, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare
 
“The government is to blame. Without creating necessary infrastructure, without medicines, without medical equipment and lab facilities, how can a doctor function if posted in a distant village? Housing and schools for doctors’ families should be there,” said Kiranshankar.
 
(Mallikarjunan is a Bengaluru-based independent reporter and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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बात करते हैं शहडोल की जहाँ सांसद दलपत सिंह परस्ते के निधन के बाद लोकसभा सीट पर उपचुनाव होना है। इलाके में स्वास्थ्य सेवाओं की हालत यह है कि लोगों ने 108 एंबुलेंस सेवा का नाम तक नहीं सुना है। अनूपपुर जिले के आदिवासी मरीजों को “मचिया” पर लाते और ले जाते हैं।

मचिया एक तरह की देशी व्यवस्था है जिसमें एक बड़ी मज़बूत लकड़ी के बीच में काँवर की तरह मरीज को बैठने की व्यवस्था की जाती है और दो लोग इसे अपने कंधे पर लादकर ले जाते हैं। इसी मचिया रूपी एंबुलेंस के सहारे मुख्यमंत्री शिवराज सिंह चौहान विकास का दावा करते हुए शहडोल लोकसभा उपचुनाव जीतना चाहते हैं।
 
अनूपपुर जिले का सबसे पिछड़ा आदिवासी बहुल गाँव राजेन्द्रग्राम है, जहाँ उल्टी-दस्त, पेट दर्द से पीड़ित शुक्ला बैगा को इलाज कराने मचिया पर लाया गया। अधिकतर मरीज 25-30 किलोमीटर पैदल चलकर ही इलाज कराने आते हैं। शुक्ला बैगा और उसके परिवार वाले बताते हैं कि उन्हें किसी 108 एंबुलेंस का नाम तक नहीं सुना है।
 
खास बात यह भी है कि बैगा आदिवासी, एक विलुप्त हो रही जनजाति है। इस जनजाति के संरक्षण के लिए बैगा विकास के नाम पर एकीकृत आदिवासी परियोजना में अरबों रूपये की राशि रोड, मकान, बिजली, पानी, स्वास्थ सुविधा के नाम पर खर्च की जाती है, लेकिन ये सुविधाएँ दरअसल केवल कागज पर ही रहती हैं और सारी रकम मंत्री और अफसर चटकर जाते हैं।

जिले के दूरदराज के गाँवों में किसी तरह के इलाज की कोई सुविधा नहीं है। ज्यादातर आदिवासी तो झाड़-फूंक के सहारे ही रहते हैं और अपनी जान गंवाते रहते हैं। इनकी हालत सुधारने में न सरकार की रुचि है और न अफसरों की।  इनके विकास के लिए इसी तरह से अरबों रुपए आते रहें, इसके लिए आदिवासियों की दयनीय हालत में रखना ज़रूरी समझा जाता है।

The post शहडोल की ‘मचिया’ एंबुलेंस के सहारे आदिवासी appeared first on SabrangIndia.

यह घटना रविवार दोपहर तब सामने आयी जब सोशल मीडिया पर अपने बेटे का शव कंधे पर लिए एक आदिवासी व्यक्ति की तस्वीर फैल गई. खबर यह थी कि वघाई के सरकारी अस्पताल ने इस व्यक्ति के लिए एम्बुलेंस की व्यवस्था करने से इनकार कर दिया था. शाम को सरकार ने इस मामले में स्पष्टीकरण दिया।

भाषा की खबर के अनुसार, उसने कहा कि वघाई में मजदूर का काम करने वाले केशु पांचरा अपने 12 वर्षीय बीमार बेटे मिनेष को शहर के सरकारी अस्पताल में ले गए, यह परिवार जनजाति बहुल दाहोद का रहने वाला है. डॉक्टरों ने बच्चे को अस्पताल लाए जाने पर मृत घोषित कर दिया।

सरकारी बयान के अनुसार अस्तपाल के पास शव वाहन नहीं था और केशु निजी वाहन का इंतजाम नहीं कर पाए. इसलिए, उन्होंने खुद ही शव ले जाने की अनुमति मांगी।

बयान के अनुसार केशु ने डॉक्टर से कहा कि चूंकि वह पास में ही रहते हैं, तो उन्हें कोई दिक्कत नहीं होगी. कुछ स्थानीय लोगों ने उन्हें शव ले जाते हुए देखा और इस तरह गुमराह करने वाली खबर सामने आयी।

डांग के जिलाधिकारी ने तब वघई के तालुका मामलतदार से परिवार में जाने और उसे सभी संभव सहायता देने को कहा।अधिकारियों ने शव को अंतिम संस्कार के वास्ते परिवार के गांव दाहोद जिले में ले जाने के लिए वाहन का इंतजाम कराया।

This article was first published on Janta ka Reporter
 

The post गुजरात में बीमार स्वास्थ्य सेवा, बेटे का शव कंधे पर लेकर घर पहुंचा आदिवासी appeared first on SabrangIndia.