The prolonged monsoon and the diseases that come with it have really tested Delhi’s health-care infrastructure. There is a huge shortage of beds in government as well as private hospitals. You can find patients wreathing in fever in the corridors, emergency wards, everywhere. Why aren’t there enough hospitals around? Contrast this with the media: Nowhere in the world will you find so many newspapers, magazines and television channels than India....

MONA SANGWAN, a teacher at a private school in Delhi, who earns just Rs. 4,000 a month and is her family’s sole earning member, had nearly begun to despair. How on earth was she going to raise Rs. 7,000 every month to buy the medicines her brother Ashwini, a kidney transplant patient, needed? Mona would have continued to despair had not the NGO Sarvohit Social Welfare Society stepped in. And to...

The out-of-pocket healthcare spending by Indians continues to push them further into poverty with the public spending on health is almost negligible, according to the India Health Report 2010. Studies have documented that households in India spend a disproportionate share of their consumption expenditure on health, with the contribution from government being almost negligible. Public spending on health is very low, stagnant at about 1 per cent of GDP, putting India...

KEY TRENDS   • Maternal Mortality Ratio for India was 370 in 2000, 286 in 2005, 210 in 2010, 158 in 2015 and 145 in 2017. Therefore, the MMRatio for the country decreased by almost 61 percent between 2000 and 2017 *14    • As per the NSS 71st round, among rural females aged 5-29 years, the main reasons for dropping out/ discontinuance were: engagement in domestic activities, not interested in education, financial constraints and marriage. Among rural males aged...

Last week saw the publication by BS Books of the India Health Report 2010 (henceforth referred to as IHR10), edited (and mostly written) by Ajay Mahal, Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari. For anyone interested in India’s health status, access to health care and medicines, emerging health problems, the infrastructure of health services, medical ethics, health-care financing, government programmes and regulations and key issues in health sector reform, this 138-page report...