Initial Diagnosis; Treatment Unavailable!

Rural India is home to 66% of the nation’s population. Do they not have a right to health care?

Every second in that hallway felt like an hour. The ticking clock echoed Geeta’s heartbeats. An unbearable sense of helplessness had descended on both the parents that morning. They would not see their son again for the next six hours. Thinking back on that day, Geeta asked herself time and time again, ‘Why would their own hospital not have any of the required personnel? Why should they have to travel over five hours for their son to get any medical attention?’

 Geeta’s husband Das remembers the numerous times he was in his son’s place, the story had always been the same: Anything more than a fracture and you have to travel the same five hours, wait more hours to get operated on, get better and come back to the same place.    These were the times he thought to himself, ‘Why would anyone live in this place?’ A survey from the National Sample Survey Office in 2018 puts Karnataka in the lower half of state- wise active doctor workforce rankings. With an estimated 5.7 doctors active per 10000 persons, it lies 17th with neighbour state Kerala leading and Bihar at the lowest.

With a population of around 300, Kaiga was a quaint town tucked away in the Western Ghats. It came under the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka. Built as living quarters for the workers of the Nuclear Power Plant nearby, it was surrounded by hills, and inhabited by birds and animals of various kinds. Lackluster facilities and services were prevalent in the remote community. Nearly every case involving more than a simple fracture was forwarded to an outside facility since the hospital that was there was completely insufficient. Any serious condition was almost a lost cause if the family didn’t act quickly.

On that fateful day in April, Gautam experienced this first-hand. His football team was poised to win in the Ambedkar Memorial tournament. A slip was all it took to knock him down his studs. He was down screaming, looking at a deformed left hand. The x-ray showed three different fractures. The local doctor, Dr. Ause said that he could not be treated here and had to be taken to Manipal, Udupi. A five-hour surgery later, he had in his left arm two steel wires and a steel plate. He looked nothing like the boy crying with sheer pain as the ambulance sped erratically through the national highway at 2 a.m.

If only the hospital back in Kaiga had the required medical infrastructure to deal with this.  The only measure they had to his injury was painkillers. That night Gautam had to wait a full hour for the ambulance to arrive. Das and Geeta recall Gautam's sobs as the ambulance rocked from time to time. It was only later they realised that the driver was drunk at that time. It was only an hour later into the journey that a new driver came and switched with him.

This is by no means a unique case. Around 74% of all doctors in India are present in urban areas according to research done by the University of Calicut in 2013. This is a rather distressing statistic given that just 28% of the country's population lives here. This highlights the alarming absence of healthcare in India's rural areas. 

The whistle rang as the P.T. period ended. Gautam came running to collect his tiffin from his mom. His recovery was nothing short of striking as the nerves had all regenerated quickly with no major surgeries. “It was a miracle,” Das said as he narrated the experience. Stories like these do not always have a happy ending. Anxiety, uncertainty and lack of infrastructure are things people in the rural areas of this country deal with every day.

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhumane.”

~Martin Luther King Jr.