Infant Index

Safdarjung Hospital is one of the largest public hospitals in the country and is located at the heart of the Capital. It has just set a record of sorts: in the month of June, 142 of the 1175 infants admitted into its paediatric wards did not survive. It needed media attention — the story was broken by the Express — and sustained public outrage to impress upon its administrators that this state of affairs was simply unacceptable. So immured had they become to hospital deaths that they could not perceive it as anything but “normal” occurrences.

True, the hospital is catering to vast numbers of patients that it cannot turn away; true, very ill infants are brought to its portals. But that has been the reality for years and should have surprised nobody. One would have thought that a public hospital as well-established and prestigious as this one would have put in place the required systems to cope. Instead, there is this spectacle of crowded wards, extremely ill children being bunched together on one bed, outsiders being allowed free access to wards, malfunctioning taps, an abject lack of basic infrastructure like X-ray machines and ventilators. The facile manner in which the Safdarjang Hospital authorities responded to the rising mortality rates in their paediatric wards tells a larger story of health care in this country. We have come to accept and accommodate to the chronic state of ill-health that besets our public hospitals because none of the people who really matter have a stake in the health system. Not one minister’s child has had to suffer the fate of those 142 faceless babies who died in June. It also tells us that public healthcare — such as it is — is only available in the big cities. That for millions, primary health centres have become something of a joke: absentee doctors plus absentee medicines. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was only acknowledging this failure when he made an attempt to encourage private investment in rural hospitals by providing tax benefits in this budget.

There cannot, in fact, be a more sensitive indicator of governance than the health of infants — society’s most vulnerable category. If, in Delhi, infant deaths demonstrated a serious breakdown in the health delivery system, in interior Maharashtra — where one estimate puts infant deaths in the state’s tribal belt at 1,000 in June — they signal a government in denial, one that has lost its ability to respond to the real needs of the people. Perhaps, we need to judge the record of governments by a new index. Call it the Infant Index.