- India's growing status as an economic superpower is masking a failure to stem a shocking rate of infant deaths among its poorest people.
- Nearly two million children under five die every year in India – one every 15 seconds – the highest number anywhere in the world. More than half die in the month after birth and 400,000 in their first 24 hour00s.
- A devastating report by Save the Children, due out on Monday, reveals that the poor are disproportionately affected and the charity accuses the country of failing to provide adequate healthcare for the impoverished majority of its one billion people. While the World Bank predicts that India's economy will be the fastest-growing by next year and the country is an influential force within the G20, World Health Organisation figures show it ranks 171st out of 175 countries for public health spending.
- Malnutrition, neonatal diseases, diarrhoea and pneumonia are the major causes of death. Poor rural states are particularly affected by a dearth of health resources. But even in the capital, Delhi, where an estimated 20% of people live in slums, the infant mortality rate is reported to have doubled in a year, though city authorities dispute this.
- In the Bhagwanpura slum on the north-west fringes of the capital, numerous mothers have lost one or more infants in their first years of life through want of basic medical attention.
- Akila Anees's son, Mohammed Armann, who was almost three, died in her arms three weeks ago. A torrential downpour had flooded the slum, rainwater mixing with the raw sewage which fills the ink-black drains bisecting the narrow lanes. It rose to a depth of 2ft. Within days, Armann had fallen ill and died soon afterwards.
- Save the Children says millions of mothers and their babies are simply not getting the skilled medical care they need, and the poor, in particular, have been left behind. "For many poor parents and their children, seeking medical help is a luxury and health services are often too far away," said Shireen Miller, its head of policy and advocacy in India.
- "The difference between rich and poor is huge. In a city like Delhi it is more stark because we have got state-of-the-art hospitals and women giving birth under flyovers. The health service has failed to deliver. They are supposed to reach the poorest, but they have not."
- India's state healthcare system is supposed to be open to all, offering access to government-run hospitals. The reality is that, while government hospitals often offer high standards of care, they can be overcrowded, and if they are short of the required medicines patients are asked to pay for them themselves. In the meantime, private health care has surged and now accounts for the majority of India's medical provision, giving access to world-class facilities for those who can pay or who can afford private insurance premiums.
- According to the UK India Business Council, about 50 million middle-class Indians can afford private healthcare – a growing number but still a tiny fraction of the overall population – while the country still lags behind other developed countries, with only 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000 people compared with a global average of 4.
- Many slum-dwellers are too far from hospitals to make use of their facilities, because they cannot afford to use private auto-rickshaws to reach them and there is no public transport. Instead they turn to quack doctors – a slightly cheaper option, but because they are unregulated and notoriously unreliable, one fraught with dangers.
- According to the report, the national mortality rate for under-fives in the poorest fifth of the population is 92 in 1,000 compared with 33 for the highest fifth. The national average is 72.
- A couple of hundred yards from Anees's shack in Bhagwanpura, Gudiya, 22, sat holding her surviving daughter, Priya, two, amid scenes of abject squalor. Almost every square inch of the slum is covered in a layer of rubbish and human and animal waste. She has lost three children in four years.
- Her most recent child, a boy, died two days after she gave birth at home, she said. "He cried, but it was feeble and he gradually turned cold. We wrapped him in blankets and took him to the hospital but I could feel he was getting weaker, and then I could see he was not breathing and there was no heartbeat and then the doctor said he was dead." Three years ago her three-month-old son, Ahmit, died from pneumonia. A year earlier her five-month-old daughter, Kumkum, died after developing a fever.
- Delhi's health minister, Kiran Walia, has blamed migration into the city for its problems, but many poorer families simply feel that they are shut out by the system. Selma Shakil's son, Muzzamil, died in July after she was turned away from a government hospital. He was a year old. She sat on the hard wooden bed in the tiny room in Bhagwanpura that is home to her two surviving children and her crippled husband and dabbed at her eyes with her headscarf.
- "It was shattering for us. We were so happy when he was born, he was so happy and playful. I would give everything to get him back, but we can't," said Shakil, 27.
- Muzzamil had been ill for months. Shakil had taken him to a government hospital three times; the first time they gave him medicine and sent her home, the second time he was admitted for a few days and then discharged, and the third time they turned her away. "They said they would not take him; they said, 'You can't keep coming here, the child will be fine'."
- The day he died the doctors told her he was sleepy because of the medicines he was taking. She went home, but then he started groaning. "His breath was shallow, and that was when I realised it was too late. I took him in my arms. He opened his eyes once and said 'Ammi' [mummy] and that was it. He died in my arms." They buried him the same evening.
- The Save the Children report says nearly nine million children die worldwide every year before the age of five. India has the highest number of deaths, with China fifth. Afghanistan has the dubious distinction of featuring in the top 10 of total child deaths and of child deaths per head of population, a list topped by Sierra Leone.
A strange uneasiness, a queer sense of pity flashes across everyone’s heart, when you are on your way to work, or school, or just the daily supermarket and pass by a slum. Although evanescent it’s queer, so much so that perhaps an instant later one would probably be admonishing himself/herself mentally as to why that ludicrous idea had been given even a momentary access to the highly sophisticated, upper class, too-busy-to-think-of-such-trivial-matters mind of mine. Then he/she would definitely roll up the glass and spend the rest of the journey probably reading the newspaper, often telling the chauffer to turn up the radio or just mindlessly exercising the fingers away at mankind’s new best friend. Why? Just to draw the minds’ attention from one of the biggest anomalies of the developing world, and that too in a country that boasts of having the highest growth rate among the Trillion Dollar economies.
A miserable, blotched, hapless picture of stained tin covered huts and houses is the first thing that would come to your mind if you thought of a slum. According to the UN-HABITAT “a slum is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security.” Well ever been inside one of our very own city slums? The picture is far more gross than painted by our analytical experts. Home to India’s original ‘six-packers’, a place teeming with half-naked children running around barefooted on coarse gravel down the thinnest of lanes imaginable, the incessant barking of rabid street dogs, the occasional cry of a family evicted from a squalid shack, the dark corners of the side-lanes with covering hooded guys betting their meagre oppurtunences on a vile game of luck or simply sharing a smoke.
DHARAVI
The houses and settlements are so out of shape that one might wonder, would they withstand even a tiny breeze before collapsing. The hand-pump on every cross-road that never has yielded a drop of water from time immemorial, the street-lamps that never fail to disappoint, the irreplaceable ‘out-of-order’ sign on the local public phone, open stinking sewer pits, all of that coupled with the never settling cloud of dust and ubiquitous mosquitos.
But the most astonishing part of all this is that in a slum no one ever seems to be complaining. The people has accepted the way of life with such unbelievable serenity and calmness that makes you wonder whether these people really face a tough time out here. The answer is an emphatic ‘NO’ if one would judge from the perspective of the number of televisions each household has, or the refrigerators, and scores of other electronic gadgets. Scour the scene for what you and me call liveable conditions and I am sure you’d end up with a big zero on the grade-sheet. That might seem like two contrasting statements.
Well the thing is that these slum-dwellers have developed ingenious techniques to get all they want! Need an electricity connection without the monthly bill reaching you? Just throw a metallic wire onto one of the overhead supply lines and voila!! You have 24X7 electricity supply. Even the Middle class don’t have that luxury. The presence of power solves a lot of problems, mind you. The extremely cheap black market electronic gadgets in an average slum household will surely pull the rug from underneath you.
But what these areas lack in is the bare essentials. According to WaterAid India’s urban population is increasing faster than its total population leading to heavy congestion in the cities and henceforth the slums are more, and more people migrate to the cities from villages in search for jobs. In a survey it was found that less than 35% of slums in Chattisarh, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat,Bihar have access to drinking Tap water. Only 44% of the notified slums had drainage facilities of any kind. Half of the notified slums had public latrine facilities while just 17% of the non-notified slums had that luxury, yes it is a luxury there. The drinking water quality too will shock several of us. It was observed that there has been contamination of the water supply due broken underground sewage drains in 37% of the slums.
The slum waters of Dharavi, Wadala Mumbai have reported to be having extreme levels of fluoride and other toxic chemicals. The extreme scarcity of lavatories is highlighted by the fact Dharavi in Mumbai has 1 toilet for 1440 slum dwellers. The one thing that you should’nt expect to get in an Indian slum is sanitation. Acute poverty, combined with illiteracy drives the youngsters of these slums to resort to abominable acts like betting, narcotics, economically exploit the upper class, black market and illegitimate export, illegal liquor sale, prostitution etc. On an average 90% of all the construction in a slum is illegal. All these factors like poor sanitation, water supply, unhygienic conditions, lack of proper medical aid lead to premature deaths, high infant mortality rates in a slum. Average life expectancy in Indian slums is 47 years for males and 51 for females.
These slums are places that feed the fourth-class work force of our urban livelihood. Imagine a week with the house maid deciding to shut shop. I bet it gives the jitters to every middle-class house wife. Imagine a day without the fourth class staff of the goverrment offices and private institutes. Little do we ever reflect upon the fact that our ships in the waters of a developing country are probably sailing smoothly due to the product of these very slums
The pressures of improving the Urban developed picture of India has unintentionally deepened the slum crisis. The number of people living in slums in India is more than the total population of United Kingdom, the Indian Government has announced. Still we all tend to overlook the stark truth facing us dead in the face. Being generous towards a handful of the top economic strata and producing the maximum millionares in the world is not going to cement India’s place at the top internationally. Recently the Commonwealth Games 2010 hosted by New Delhi saw scores of advertisement hoardings on high scaffoldings all along the high flyovers barely 100 metres apart from each other. At first sight, looks like the managers left no stone unturned to publicise the mega event doesn’t it? Well those high scaffoldings were simply the efforts of the Delhi government to hide the stark naked truth of 51% of the delhi population living in slums behind a thin layer of plastic and wood from the foreign delegates so that they wouldn’t feel uneasy. The movie Slumdog Millionaire completely shot in the slums of Dharavi portrayed the miserable life of a slum and the world saw it and laughed. We Indians saw it too, but simply as a 3 hour entertainment package without realizing that it was actually sounding the death-knell for our reputation as a superpower. Some of us voiced our opinion against it’s screening on grounds of it defiling the image of “India Shining” economically as well as culture.