Life and death after politics

At a recent powwow with journalists in the Capital, Dalit Ezhilmalai, the man who's been presiding over the Ministry of Health and Family...

At a recent powwow with journalists in the Capital, Dalit Ezhilmalai, the man who’s been presiding over the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in the past 13 months, was asked to list three achievements. Considering that Atal Behari Vajpayee’s patchwork dispensation had filled up newspapers with self-congratulatory ads at the time of its star-crossed anniversary, we were quite sure the honourable minister would manage to rustle up at least three achievements. Instead, we were entertained by the spectacle of a minister breaking into embarrassed laughter, even as his harried officials scribbled furiously on little slips of paper. It was odd, for the minister had just delivered a 33-page speech, yet we had to sit through five minutes of more laughter, more furious scribbling, more pregnant pauses.

The truth is that for the 13 months he’s spent in New Delhi, Ezhilmalai has nothing to justify his stay. But why blame only him? With politics derailing national priorities (and health, I presume, is one, whatwith the average Indian family spending 20 per cent of its earnings on illnesses), the social sector has well and truly gone out of fashion. Not only for the politicians, but also for the mainstream media. As a journalist put it dramatically at a recent workshop on reproductive health in Kathmandu: “Even a subject that is all about sex isn’t sexy enough for the media!” That may be why Dalit Ezhilmalai could get away with loud laughter when asked to list just three achievements of his ministry. And now, not even the Demands for Grants of the ministry will get to be discussed. All because we’ve had a coalition that didn’t know how to manage contradictions. That it never got time for anything other than trying to survive. But before this becomes a social sector journalist’s lament, let me spell out what Dalit Ezhilmalai could have done, but chose not to do.

Had the country had a stable government and an able health minister, it would have had a population policy, the groundwork for which had been preparedback in 1993 by the M. S. Swaminathan Committee. The problem, though, is that the committee asked for people’s control over population control, going to the extent of asking for the abolition of the Department of Family Welfare and transferring its role to Panchayati Raj institutions. Now, that’s something our bureaucracy will never allow to happen. So, only political will can ensure the safe passage of the population policy, but do you know someone who has it? The alternative is to let population become a politically explosive issue when, after the statutory delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies in the year 2001, southern politicians will find out to their horror that their representation in Parliament will actually come down because of their success in population control.

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But the population policy is just one of the drafts awaiting the attention of our fractious political elite. There’s the draft national blood policy gathering cobwebs, which means the powers-that-be have no plan to make bloodaccessible to the people. Then there’s the draft national HIV/AIDS policy waiting to see the light of day, which means no one in the government has even started bothering to find out if we really have an HIV/AIDS epidemic that the World Bank wants us to believe we have. And, of course, there’s the draft health policy, which has become absolutely necessary, now that it is clear India cannot keep its `health for all by the year 2000′ promise to the international community. How can we have health for all when our primary health centres have neither doctors to run them, nor medicines for their intended beneficiaries? There’s so much to do, Mr Ezhilmalai!

So much, in fact, that the resolutions adopted at the Sixth Conference of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare add up to 72 pages, each with action points that should have a phalanx of officials working overtime. The council, for instance, has for the first time mooted a plan to address the health needs of the urban slum population, a nation of tencrore people with no access to half-way decent care. Another of the council’s suggestions is for the government to earmark 1 per cent of the taxes it collects from tobacco products for an outreach campaign to educate people on the dangers of tobacco. It’s a big step forward — along with the resolution asking the government to ban the consumption of gutka, a proven cancer-causing substance that shouldn’t be out there in the market — and long overdue, for the annual tobacco disease burden, according to Ezhilmalai, translates into Rs 12,000 crore at current prices, which is more than even the 1999-2000 Union health budget that Parliament won’t get to discuss.

And that’s not all. The council has dealt at length with issues like having a national policy for medicinal plants to ensure that we get to benefit from our biodiversity before pharmaceutical transnationals get into the act. It is a sign of our health policy establishment waking up to an international market that by the ministry’s estimation isworth Rs. 63,000 crore today, yet the Department of Indigenous Systems of Medicine and Homeopathy gets just 3-4 per cent of the budget allocation (or Rs 50 crore this year). The council, appropriately, has asked that the allocation be raised to 20 per cent and steps initiated to rationalise indigenous systems of medicine and homeopathy education. Remember, these are just points skimmed off 72 pages. But someone has got to spare some time for them. That’s the hard part. With divisive politics returning as the flavour of the season, who cares about the way people live, or die. Not our political establishment at least.