Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 02 July 2018 | Page 12

COVER STORY
CHILDCARE
ON OXYGEN
Gorakhpur was just a symptom. Children’s healthcare is ailing across
the country, and it gets worse as one goes deeper into the hinterland.
NAEEM ANSARI
by Pragya Singh in Gorakhpur
I
T’S 9 pm and Gorakhpur’s hipsters are out, all set to
cruise town in their swish sedans. The morning’s snarl-
ups are easing—traffic is a pet peeve for townspeople—
and the 150-year-old Gorakhpur Club is letting spirits
flow. We find here a doctor, a builder and a miner, an
assortment of jet-setters. You’d think they count them-
selves among the lucky in this city, but no. They too start
chafing the moment they are made to recall those two days
in August last year when 52 people died, 34 of them chil-
dren, in the city’s largest government hospital. The citizen-
ship of Gorakhpur is like a zone of shared pain and anger.
August 9-10, 2017, is a red circle on the calendar—the day
when Gorakhpur hit the national headlines. But those two days
only expressed, in concentrated form, a sickness that hasn’t
been cured. People say nothing has changed at Baba Raghav
Das (BRD) Medical College in this one year. And even that’s
only a symptom of what’s wrong, a hint of the sheer enormity
of failure. Among medical professionals and policy planners,
there’s dismay at the serious shortcomings haunting public
healthcare, especially child care, in the whole rural catchment
LAST RESORT Children’s ward in a Lucknow hospital
12 OUTLOOK 2 July 2018