healthcare

Raging through 2020 and continuing in the new year as well, the COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus the state of health infrastructure in the country. The scramble for hospital beds across cities, oxygen scarcity and medicine shortage, the helplessness of patients suffering from other chronic or terminal illnesses highlighted the wide gaps in our public healthcare system. But apart from that, another issue that came into sharp public focus, after years of neglect, is the plight of senior citizens in our urban settlements. Unable to step out of the house as they came under the vulnerable category, and often…

Jagruti Devi is a waste picker and lives in the slums of Rangpuri Pahadi in Delhi. Her husband collects waste in the mornings and sells vegetables on a pushcart in the evenings, while Jagruti Devi segregates waste at home. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the lockdown was put in place, her husband hasn’t been able to go out to collect waste or to sell vegetables. “We haven’t been able to work since March. We have no savings left. If we can’t go back to work, I don’t know how we are supposed to survive,” Jagruti says. The lack of…

The rotis lay strewn about on the railway track near Aurangabad - a tragic testimony to the plight of the poor in our country. Having packed their meagre belongings, with a bundle of food to be shared among the many, they only wanted to go home. Yet 16 people ended up being run over by a train as they fell asleep, exhausted, on the railway track near Aurangabad. The price for a ticket home cost them more than they bargained for.  The issue of migrants wanting to return their homes has been as big a problem as the pandemic of…

On February 10th, Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Health & Family Welfare, issued a suo moto statement in the Lok Sabha on the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease in China and some other countries, and the subsequent actions taken by the Government of India. Coronaviruses are a large group of viruses that cause illness in humans and animals. Rarely, animal corona viruses can evolve and infect people, and then spread between people as has been seen with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2014. China reported an outbreak of Novel…

My team and I had the first detailed meeting with our local NGO partners from GB road, an infamous red light district of Delhi, in the summer of 2016. It was at the very outset that they warned us that the intended beneficiaries of our scheduled project, which aimed to provide quality eye care at their doorstep, were likely to have reservations about interacting with us, ‘outsiders.’ These were the sex workers and their families residing in the brothels of GB Road. Our partners, Lalitha Nayak (from SPID org), a very experienced educator and social worker and Geetanjali Babbar and…

In the increasingly consumerist world that we live in, not a day goes by when we don’t shop -- whether it is for small things like vegetables, fruits or chocolate, or bigger stuff like cars, refrigerators and phones. And it is quite maddening when the vegetable seller palms off some spoilt cauliflowers on us, or gives us stale fish that even the cat turns up its nose at. Your new refrigerator might stop working in the middle of a very hot day or the stitches of the expensive dress you bought at the mall may come apart in a day’s…

It has been a year of discontent in the medical sector with patients losing patience, doctors threatening to go on strike and governments resorting to thrust-and-parry. At different points in time throughout the year, governments in different parts of the country were seen to lock horns with the medical system, beginning with Kolkata in June, going on to Bengaluru in November and most recently in Delhi this month. Delhi The latest flashpoint emerged in the capital city, the trigger being an incident at the Max Hospital at Shalimar Bagh, where a couple of doctors falsely declared the death of a…