The Indian healthcare is a dark side of the local statehood. In the country, there are two categories of healthcare. The first of them develops in more or less large cities generally on the basis of the former colonial clinics. There is worthy hardware, especially in a private sector, the doctors who have got an education abroad or even foreign experts work there. Another thing is that all these are available only to a very small percent of people of almost milliard population of the country.
The medicine of India
In private clinics of the country, it is possible to receive treatment according to the level of the international standards. The prices for the medical services are the lowest which differ India from the other providers (clinics of the United States of America, Germany and Great Britain). The difference in the price for separate types of service on a surgical intervention can often reach 70-90 %. The medicine of India represents a great interest for tourists from all over the world. Therefore, so-called medical tourists go there to perform cardiological or orthopedic operations. Plastic surgeries and artificial insemination are in the greatest demand. Despite the rather low cost of medical care in India, the experts of medicine have a fine reputation. A great part of the Indian doctors have a practical training and are educated in the best clinics and world schools. The private Indian medical centers are equipped with the latest equipment in the medicine sphere. The state policy of the country in the field of the healthcare is directly keeping on the role of a key player of the medical international tourist market in the country. Thanks to the activities of the Ministry for healthcare in India, the Indian medical association, the Medical Council of India and the Indian federation of healthcare, the compliance to the international standards of all medical institutions in the country, in particular, to the Joint Commission International standard of the world health system (a standard of the United States of America) is provided. The medicine of India is attractive thanks to an exclusive ratio “price-quality”, as the patients, coming here to be operated, receive the highest service in the medicine sphere. It is still necessary to tell that the whole world is familiar with the results of the activity of the Indian pharmaceutical industry. In the world, probably, there is no more country where such a number of the pharmaceutical companies would operate: their number is measured here by tens of thousands. Another thing is that, besides authoritative and serious producers of good and very needy preparations, the mass of the firms are situated in insanitary cellars and do not have any rights to such activity. So, it is not necessary to speak about the quality of their production.
As for the rest of India, it often shows such not advertized examples of poverty that they could be apprehended as a miracle for foreigners. There are the most extensive layers of the deprived in the social structure of the country. Their representatives are unclear yogins, ascetics, monks; the poor are deprived of everything, and their unique property sometimes consists only of a plastic cup for collecting handouts. The poverty in India is consecrated with century traditions of religious refusal of the every possible benefit which, according to the local believers, distract the person from aspirations to the heavenly. Another thing is that it is finished to the point of absurdity, and it creates really awful pictures in aggregating with a complete poverty of the country. Millions of people are deprived of the slightest social protection and provision, sick old men, who are actually younger than sixty years old, are necessary to nobody.
The official Indian statistics in the field of medicine looks rather disturbing: the expenses on the healthcare in the country make about 1% of the Gross Domestic Product, that is four dollars on a person a year. Rural clinics and ambulance stations of the primary link serve on the average from three to five thousands of people, pretty often working without electricity, telecommunication and an elementary set of drugs. Child and maternal mortality in India remains one of the highest in the world.
Financing of the system of the national healthcare is carried out from the federal budget, and local authorities have no mechanisms of control over the local security services of health. Budgetary funds, naturally, do not suffice. The western countries, where financing of the healthcare is estimated in thousands of dollars on a person, do not refuse to help India. Why does India’s healthcare system appear so low-effective? The reasons are low financing and a traditional corruption. It also appears that the Indian medical staff, which is so catastrophically insufficient in the whole country, has been absent on a workplace for nearly a half of the working hours without any good reason. Such dishonesty can be explained as a total absence of material interest and not the best features of national mentality. The dream of any medical expert is to leave the province and to get over in any medical center as soon as possible. As a result, in almost 80 % of cases, patients look for help at so-called folk healers, the majority of which, naturally, have no vocational education. A direct danger often proceeds from these “doctors”. There is an obscure statistics in India of unsuccessful and lethal outcomes – the results of such a treatment. It turns out that the level of an “ordinary” medicine in India is very low. One more general trouble is a complete defiance to hygiene and minimum sanitary standards. The guests of the country, over whom a threat of sharp enteric infections hangs over almost inevitably, suffer from it, first of all. The dental help is carried out on the equipment which was not used in the world several decades ago. It is paradoxical but there are so many drugs in India, even too many of them, only there is nobody to prescribe them because of the absence of the qualified doctor. The indicator of the distribution of HIV infection/AIDS, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes is very high there.
One can only advise India to increase considerably the allocations for the needs of the healthcare and to develop a national system of medical insurance. The only thing is to observe what will happen with the awful India’s healthcare and where the tendency to the Indian economic growth will deduce.