Centre's policies behind increasing ill-health: Binayak Sen

Binayak Sen, leading human rights activist and vice-president of the People's Union of Civil Liberties, has said social and economic inequities are the major causes of ill-health and death in India. While state action ought to reduce the inequities, the neoliberal economic policies of the Central government have only created and encouraged them, he alleged. Referring to a World Health Organisation report titled ‘Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale,' Dr. Sen said inequities and injustice were increasing in the country. In his keynote talk at a seminar on Right to health vis-?-vis the vulnerable people' at the Government Law College here, Dr. Sen pointed out that there was chronic under-nourishment (that is, body mass index or BMI below 18.5) across the country. About 37 per cent of adult Indians had a BMI under 18.5. In the case of SCs, STs and minorities, this was more than 50 per cent. By WHO standards, if one third of a community was undernourished, the situation could be described as ‘community famine.' So, large swathes of Indian society were chronically in a state of famine, he said. Dr. Sen, who is a paediatrician, noted that according to the HUNGaMA (hunger and malnutrition) report, 44 per cent of the children below five years of age in India were malnourished, prompting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to call the situation a ‘national shame.' About a fourth of the babies were born malnourished because their mothers were malnourished too. Dr. Sen, who is also a member of the standing committee on health of the Planning Commission, said the committee had recommended earmarking 2.15 of the GDP for healthcare by the end of the Twelfth Plan. He called for a mandatory ‘diagnostic and treatment protocol' which should include people's real-time access to information about their health. Currently, the information about a patient's health was in the custody of the hospital where he is treated. “There should be democratisation of the flow of information about helath,” he said. “People's health information should be in their hands.” The former Supreme Court judge, Cyriac Joseph, who opened the three-day seminar, said that the constitutional directive to the Indian state to ‘secure justice for all' included right to health too. Right to health was also part of the right to life guaranteed by Article 21. Mr. Joseph said judicial activism was essential in the Indian context to correct the errors of the legislative and executive wings of the state. If the judiciary did not intervene, social and economic injustices would grow.