Amid India's graft epidemic, health care officials and dcotors are being killed
New York Times, Sep 18, 2011, 01.30pm IST
national Rural Health Mission|
================================================
LUCKNOW: The first doctor to die, a senior government health administrator, was shot on his early morning walk last October by two men on a motorbike. Six months later, his successor, a cardiologist, was shot to death while out on a predawn stroll. A third government doctor, accused of conspiring to murder the first two, was found dead in jail in June, lying in a pool of blood with deep cuts all over his body.
The one thing the doctors had in common? All three had at one point been in charge of spending this city's portion of the nearly $2 billion that has flowed to Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, as part of a nationwide push to improve the health of India's poorest citizens.
The state's health infrastructure remains abysmal, and officials say they now suspect that the murders resulted from a virulent combination of fast money, scant oversight and a notoriously graft-addled state political leadership. The last doctor to die, relatives say, was preparing to name names in a widening scandal. The central government has stepped in to investigate.
"When this much money is given to a government that is basically a criminal enterprise, violence cannot be ruled out," said Kamini Jaiswal, a prominent lawyer who has filed several lawsuits in the case.
The recent hunger strike by the social activist Anna Hazare has drawn attention to the everyday corruption that has infuriated India's middle class – the large and small bribes people must pay to evade the hassles and harassments of an overbearing and inept state.
But in places like Uttar Pradesh, the price of corruption can be far higher, witnessed not just in the deaths of the doctors but in the toll it takes on the health of India's most vulnerable people.
Uttar Pradesh is by almost any measure one of the most corrupt states in the nation. It also has some of the worst health statistics anywhere, including rates of infant and child mortality and malnutrition to rival sub-Saharan Africa. If Uttar Pradesh were independent, its 200 million people would make it the world's fifth-largest nation, more populous than Brazil, a country with 35 times the land mass.
In 2005, the government, led by the Congress Party, created the National Rural Health Mission, which sought to overhaul the delivery of health care to the rural poor by building hundreds of thousands of new clinics and hiring millions of health workers.
New York Times, Sep 18, 2011, 01.30pm IST
national Rural Health Mission|
================================================
LUCKNOW: The first doctor to die, a senior government health administrator, was shot on his early morning walk last October by two men on a motorbike. Six months later, his successor, a cardiologist, was shot to death while out on a predawn stroll. A third government doctor, accused of conspiring to murder the first two, was found dead in jail in June, lying in a pool of blood with deep cuts all over his body.
The one thing the doctors had in common? All three had at one point been in charge of spending this city's portion of the nearly $2 billion that has flowed to Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, as part of a nationwide push to improve the health of India's poorest citizens.
The state's health infrastructure remains abysmal, and officials say they now suspect that the murders resulted from a virulent combination of fast money, scant oversight and a notoriously graft-addled state political leadership. The last doctor to die, relatives say, was preparing to name names in a widening scandal. The central government has stepped in to investigate.
"When this much money is given to a government that is basically a criminal enterprise, violence cannot be ruled out," said Kamini Jaiswal, a prominent lawyer who has filed several lawsuits in the case.
The recent hunger strike by the social activist Anna Hazare has drawn attention to the everyday corruption that has infuriated India's middle class – the large and small bribes people must pay to evade the hassles and harassments of an overbearing and inept state.
But in places like Uttar Pradesh, the price of corruption can be far higher, witnessed not just in the deaths of the doctors but in the toll it takes on the health of India's most vulnerable people.
Uttar Pradesh is by almost any measure one of the most corrupt states in the nation. It also has some of the worst health statistics anywhere, including rates of infant and child mortality and malnutrition to rival sub-Saharan Africa. If Uttar Pradesh were independent, its 200 million people would make it the world's fifth-largest nation, more populous than Brazil, a country with 35 times the land mass.
In 2005, the government, led by the Congress Party, created the National Rural Health Mission, which sought to overhaul the delivery of health care to the rural poor by building hundreds of thousands of new clinics and hiring millions of health workers.
================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment