TODAY -
Manipur's missing doctors & absconding teachers
Aheli Moitra - Morung Express | Feb 2, 2012 :
As the 10th Manipur Assembly Election came and went, a ghost lurked around—while future leaders/losers obsessed about securing assembly seats, people of their constituencies looked on with hollow eyes at the drama. They had been pitted against each other, termed ignorant for not "understanding issues", got shot and searched, they cast their vote and faced post poll backlash. But their children continue to go to schools with no teachers and healthcare centres continue to operate without anaesthetists. Ignored, the ghost just hovered around and shrugged—perhaps it'll grow teeth in the next 10 years. This election, territorial integrity played god over its human counterpart. Governance and people be damned.
In a hill district hospital of Manipur, there is no paediatrician when 50% of its patients are paediatrics. Since 1989, perhaps longer, number of patients has tripled with no corresponding increase in the number of doctors which has, instead, dipped. Eight doctors have to handle an average of 70 (at times a maximum of 200) patients a day; there is no operation theatre but one of the specialists is an anaesthetist. A physician has left to study further, without being replaced, and a paediatrician transferred the same way. In the lack of expression, medical officers, who have had the conviction to stay put and work, call it the case of the "missing doctors"—they cannot distinctively explain the phenomena without hampering their jobs and whatever little doctoral care patients receive. They say patients are being cured here by "god's grace" because there is no infrastructural support either. Just imagine the helpless irony of this statement—these are doctors!
Administration ignores this, as do politicos, for obvious reasons. Crores of rupees are pooled into the state by the centre in the form of National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), SSA or Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) bring marginal development for the periphery and increased dependence on Delhi but not without erroneous distribution mechanisms. In some district hospitals, doctors are happy just to have prescription paper and their walls painted first time since construction through NRHM. From 2005 to 2009, Manipur state showed to have expended Rs. 116.62 Crores of the Rs. 290 Crores NRHM fund allocated to it. Yet government healthcare centres remain under staffed, without medicine and infrastructure.
For the year 2011-12, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has sanctioned Rs. 5167.49 Lakhs for the universalisation of secondary education in Manipur state, through RMSA. With the centralised way of operation that Imphal adopts, the above mentioned systems of treachery are not easily removed from education; a grant like this might see some trickle down but without an overhaul of the system, it will remain clogged in and around Imphal.
Manipur, and the region's united political intelligence, ability and determination, will hopefully try to avert such a doom. And try to educate its polity on ways to demand accountability for rights the state owes to them.
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* This Post is uploaded on February 02, 2012
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