Sick of politics

There is something very skewed with a State?s political reasoning when a minister finds it more important to announce the setting up of an expert panel.

There is something very skewed with a State’s political reasoning when a minister finds it more important to announce the setting up of an expert panel to ‘improve’ the functioning of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi than tending to the thousands of government hospitals and dispensaries across the country that are probably not functioning at all. Any visitor to India’s premier research and referral hospital will notice that for all its faults, AIIMS functions at a frenetic pace. AIIMS has its problems, and it’s no secret what they are.

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It was conceived as the country’s premier medic al institution. But today, it is on the verge of collapse because it has become the ‘hospital of choice’. Despite promises and resolutions, successive governments have failed to create more such institutions to share its burden. AIIMS was set up not as a State-run hospital, but as an institute that would ‘set the pace for medical education and research’. Yet, it has traditionally been treated by politicians as their very own ‘family doctor’ — for their families and their ‘references’. In such a scheme of things, all Union Ministers of Health — and not only Anbumani Ramadoss — have seen themselves as the head of the family, and sought to run the hospital as a personal domain.

The sad consequence of this politicking is that instead of focusing on the job at hand, the Health Ministry is busy organising what appears to be, at best, a redundant inquiry, and at worst, a witch hunt.