Heath is a priority

Year after year the resources allocation for the health and education sector was neglected and eroded in terms of the population per capita. These sectors were assiduously handed over to the private sector in a creeping manner. And this was done by governments of all shades. We were told that globalisation will improve the quality of all sectors through competitiveness. We the middle class believed in this charade carefully crafted by multinationals and local crony capitalists. The economy needed to be opened up and we allowed the big bucks to control the education and health sectors. 

The whole educational system was geared to produce engineers to service the IT industry, the backbone of globalisation. Just like the East India Company and the British imperialism created the clerks to serve their interests of empire-building. All other disciplines were relegated to poor cousins. We forgot that science was not only being knowledgeable about Mathematical formulae. It was not only about scoring high ranks in the JEE. Biology, environment, Chemistry, Physics were all discarded by the middle class as second rung choices. And liberal arts was derisively ignored as a namby-pamby and worthless pursuit. 

Along with our newly founded material gains based on the crumbs of globalisation that the capitalist system handed us from their high table, we the middle class reached a stage where being intellectual was seen as a curse. Any research on basic sciences, or anything at all, was seen as waste of time, money and youth. We needed our children to reach the foreign shores in droves and earn money, for themselves and us. A thirty-plus researcher in medicine or biology was seen as someone not fitting into our scheme of things. We were confident that increasing the medical insurance sum for ourselves would see us through. Insurance, rather than universal healthcare and remedy became the buzzword. Anybody without medical insurance deserves to die, that became our way of thinking.  

Now when faced with a virus, we are crying hoarse for a vaccine. We are pushing the doctors and the health sector to deliver without providing them the resources or infrastructure. We want a quick fix solution, something like a mobile app. But we forget that vaccines can't be produced overnight. A lot of funding, infrastructure, and painstaking research needs to be done to develop it. And it also needs a clinical trial. 

The COVID-19 pandemic may end or may continue. But it gives us an important lesson. We can't ignore biotechnology, biological research or the public healthcare system. One reason why Kerala did comparatively well was because of their previous experience with the Nipah virus. If and when we come out of this present pandemic let us make sure that we resolve to build a sustainable health infrastructure. Not only four or five AIIMS hospitals as a showcase but at least one in each district of the country. Let us forget statues, temples, stadiums, and other symbolic structures. Even bridges and metro rails should take a lower priority.  We need more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses, more beds, more medicines, more masks, more ventilators, more ICUs. All other things can wait.