A tragedy beyond description has been taking place at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur, where around 63 children died in just five days last week. One reason for so many deaths at this juncture was that oxygen was in short supply as the hospital hadn’t paid the supplier on time. But it’s immaterial whether lack of oxygen supply was the direct cause for some deaths or not. The fact that it wasn’t available at a big medical college hospital, in a constituency from where Yogi Adityanath, UP’s chief minister, was earlier elected to Parliament, only indicates the carelessness of the hospital administration and bureaucracy. Payment was not given to the supplier in time, jeopardising the health of very young patients. The hospital’s apathy on such a life-and-death matter is truly shocking.
The politics over the issue was bound to be intense, given that the BJP is in power both at the Centre and in the state. It took the CM three days to get to the hospital again after a visit on August 9, when he was obviously not told of any problems. When he got there, he did act swiftly to fix responsibility: the hospital’s administrators, including Baba Raghav Das Medical College’s principal, were easy prey. Why the state health minister was spared remains a mystery. The CM blamed encephalitis as the cause of most deaths among newborns, while his health minister said low birth weight, pneumonia and kidney failures were also responsible, besides viral infection. Not quite familiar with the English language, MP Sakshi Maharaj, known to shoot off his mouth, used an odd term to describe the deaths — “genocide”. The government, however, owes an explanation for the 30 deaths in 48 hours after the problem with piped oxygen supply.
This issue goes far beyond politics. Even if we accept that viral infection may have caused encephalitis, the fact that analysis points to lack of cleanliness is a severe indictment of society. We can’t even provide basic living conditions. Government spending on healthcare and education are minimal across the country, even if there has been some improvement, with infant mortality rates falling to 41 from 57 per 1,000 live births in the past decade. But in that time public health expenditure went up only by 0.4 per cent, from 1.0 per cent of GDP to 1.4 per cent. There is a planned leap soon to 2.5 per cent of GDP. What happened in UP in terms of ante-natal deaths isn’t uncommon nationwide, which just shows how much more has to be spent to reach basic medical care to expectant mothers and newborn babies. Let not political debates over who is responsible for the UP tragedy hide the fact that we have a long way to go in averting infant mortality.
