Dear Friend,
So many people died because of lack of Oxygen in country’s prestigious hospitals and yet no questions were being asked. Officially the death figure due to Covid 19 has crossed 1,92,000 till this morning. The second wave has exposed India’s unpreparedness to deal with it. People are dying due to lack of Oxygen and non availability of beds in the hospitals
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‘System collapse’ to bring private monopolies in the Health Sector
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
So many people died because of lack of Oxygen in country’s prestigious hospitals and yet no questions were being asked. Officially the death figure due to Covid 19 has crossed 1,92,000 till this morning. The second wave has exposed India’s unpreparedness to deal with it. People are dying due to lack of Oxygen and non availability of beds in the hospitals
‘The system has collapsed’, is a general cry these days as event unfolding everyday bring more uncertainty and desperation. As an Indian, I can say, we were never so helpless as we are feeling it today. I mean, you can’t help any one, you can’t go to meet families of friends, you can’t meet relatives. Common man is just alarmed if things happen to him then what will happen. People are dying of utter neglect and we never heard a single journalist asking question to top two or top three of this government.
So many people died because of lack of Oxygen in country’s prestigious hospitals and yet no questions were being asked. Officially the death figure due to Covid 19 has crossed 1,92,000 till this morning. The second wave has exposed India’s unpreparedness to deal with it. People are dying due to lack of Oxygen and non availability of beds in the hospitals. If our memory is not too short, then remember what has happened last year during April. The government used Railway coaches as isolation centres. Many of the artificial structures were created but I don’t know how fast we ‘dismantled’ those structure when we knew that things are still in the air and no medical doctor has declared ultimate victory over Corona except the top ministers of this government. Where have those makeshift hospitals or facilities gone which were prepared to meet the challenge hospitalisation of Covid 19 infected people ? Will any one ask how much money was invested in it and who were the companies and people who got the contract ?
Now we are hearing that the government will do the same. Make an artificial structure to deal with the rising number of Corona infected people but it is also a fact that it is not Corona that is killing but lack of our preparedness, non supply of Oxygen that was responsible. It was shameful and deeply disturbing to see many of the chiefs of these prestigious hospitals were feeling suffocated and desperate at the situation because of their inability to deal with it.
As report after report castigate the government with inefficiency and insensitivity, the ruling party has again attempted to deal with it with ‘multi pronged strategy’. One side heavy PR exercise through their ‘favourite’ channels and newspapers who are ready to play for them in lieu of big favors and money and the other side is more dangerous where some of these ‘respected’ ‘patrkars’ and ‘sampadaks’ i.e. journalists and editors, are asking the government to ‘control’ the ‘freedom of expression’, in the ‘national interest’. Not to be outdone in his service to the supreme leader, our minister for the Information Technology and law asked the social media platform Twitter to remove the tweets which speak of systematic failure. The minister has always been speaking of threatening language. In the state too, journalists who are trying to give authentic information are being threatened.
When North Indian states are suffering from mismanagement and crisis of Oxygen, in South particularly Kerala and Tamilnandu have shown the way. Kerala’s 10 medical colleges have two Oxygen plants each to provide them uninterrupted supply. The state increased its Oxygen capability by 58% in the last one year. It planned meticulously by understanding the importance of it during the crisis last year. Tamilnadu has much more Oxygen than it is needed during the year. It has the capacity of producing 400 MT Oxygen per day while its demand for the hospitals so far is merely 240 MT. In Delhi Arvind Kejriwal used nearly 150 crore on his publicity exercise during the first three month of 2021 while crying over the lack of Oxygen because most of the plants have moved out of Delhi. The issue is did he not know that a crisis can happen and he has to deal with it given the nature of the central government which was not keen to allow him any freedom to do things.
The problem is that after deaths of so many known journalists, activists, academics, common persons the media woke up to show some concern about the situation and mismanagement at our hospitals. Rather than asking Narendra Modi the question, they have now started paddling a new ‘term’ ‘system collapsed’. Now this needs to be explained as what collapsed and who is responsible ?
Well, India has never invested heavily on health and education. But whatever was being spent has been reduced by the Modi government which is on a privatising spree. This government has only one agenda and that is to privatise India’s public sector rapidly and they found the Corona period the best opportunity to do so when trade unions and people will be busy or engaged in their own survival and nobody would have chance to question but they know well that things are not that easy hence a new narrative has to be started to benefit them.
When Shekhar Gupta and other ‘experts’ start the ‘system collapse’, then you must understand what narrative they are planting. Yes, these are the people who benefitted from their networking in Business and political circles. The system collapse will suggest that ‘government’ ‘alone’ cant handle this crisis so give ‘freedom’ to private companies. The whole idea is to discredit the public institutions, dismantle them and degrade them. That way, the ‘liberals’ who are actually economic right and more dangerous as they look ‘seculars’ to us but work for the benefit of the big companies who fund their projects, media empires.
A good case work would be to find out which countries performed better in dealing with Covid and what is the role of the government in the health sector. The worst was the United States and the best are Taiwan, Newzealand, Iceland, Singapore and Vietnam. And look who did the worst : USA, Brazil, Mexico, India and UK. It will be good to look at the health care system in these countries. The UK for sure failed because the government did not take timely action though the National Health Services ( NHS) proved best bet for them and at the moment they have reduced the fatalities and returning to normalcy. USA is the model of ‘corporate’ hegemony that funds a large number of ‘opinion makers’ so that they can say hosannas on the role of ‘corporate’.
India needs to be careful at this moment. I can again say, strengthen the health care system. If the centre fails to do so, let the state come with their own state owned health care system. States can always do so whether in Education or Health and invest more money in it, build big public institutions and that would work as a wonder. If the states have vision they can be the role model. Southern states in India are still far ahead of the north because north Indian hospitals have become money minting machines. It is time for the governments to strengthen health services at the districts, block and town levels so that people can go there and get quality treatment.
So system collapse should mean strengthening our health infrastructure through public sector or government money but not to hand it over to the corporate and asking them to charge exorbitantly as per their whims and fancies. This needs to be questioned. First you blamed Nehru for your failure and now you are bringing ‘system failure’ to protect your inefficiencies’ and failure. But the problem is what is the use of asking a government or a leader about its failure when it still is ‘acceptable’ to the people or when they are ready to listen to his ‘man kee baat’. A good joke that roamed around various WhatsApp groups was : Why are people asking for good hospitals and oxygen cylinders when they voted for ‘Ram Mandir’. Modi ji is fulfilling the historical demand of the people to build a ‘grand’ Ram Temple so they should be satisfied. Hospitals, schools everything can come later or we can still do without them.
It is a wake up call. We have already lost. Let us not give a chance to those who ‘weave’ new stories and make the ‘system collapse’ a means to bring private monopolies in the health sector as well as elsewhere. Understand the chronology.
Vidya Bhushan Rawat is a social activist
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Corporate India in Mirror of the Pandemic
by Dr Prem Singh
The reality of ‘Shining’, ‘New’, ‘Smart ‘, ‘Digital’ as well as ‘Ayushman’ India which has been promoted in a ‘halla-bol’ style, is exposed in the mirror of the pandemic. Patients are dying on the shoulders and in the laps of relatives without beds, medicines, oxygen, ventilators. Somewhere patients are being killed due to fire in the hospitals, somewhere due to
oxygen leakage, somewhere due to oxygen dip. Funerals after death have become a difficult task
Modi Govt’s vaccine diplomacy unravels, within India and abroad
by M K Bhadrakumar
What is foreign policy worth if it stands disconnected from domestic realities? The limelight falls instead on the US’ point blank refusal to lift the ban on supply of ingredients for manufacture of vaccines… As for China, this isn’t quite the occasion to write about it, but truth be told. Suffice to say, the Indian narrative on Sino-Indian tensions is skating on thin ice today and it increasingly looks like a trumped-up alibi to form an alliance with the US.
Five months 400 deaths still continuing: Farmers Protest Around Delhi
by Sandeep Banerjee
Since November 26, 2020, lakhs of
farmers and workers have been in their continuous sit-in protest at different points around Delhi Border. On April 26 it will complete 5 months. And the human-cost is enormous: 400+ deaths. But braving death, terrible cold, rain, storm and now around 40°+ at noon, threat of covid19, the farmers and workers are continuing; after all they work in the open fields through tough weather conditions years after years to produce food and fibre for civilisation
Birthday Greetings, Dear Fr. Stan!
by Cedric Prakash
You have been in prison for two hundred days now; but even in prison , you reach out to the less fortunate prisoners in every possible way! You care for them. You have not allowed the brutal and inhuman system to break you! Instead, you tell us with such positivity and hope, that even a caged bird sings. You are not a silent spectator and you will never be one! That is why on 26 April , your 84th birthday,
we celebrate you and sincerely thank you for all that you mean to us! With lots of love we say: “Happy Birthday dear Stan!!”
Ethnic Engineering: Denmark’s Ghetto Policy
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
The very word is chilling, but has become normalised political currency in Denmark. Since 2010, the Danish government has resorted to generating “ghetto lists” marking out areas as socially problematic for the state. In 2018, the country’s parliament passed “ghetto” laws to further regulate the lives of individuals inhabiting various city areas focusing on their racial and ethnic origins. The legislation constitutes the spear tip of the “One Denmark without Parallel Societies – No Ghettos in 2030” initiative; its target: “non-Western” residents who overbalance the social ledger by concentrating in various city environs.
The very word is chilling, but has become normalised political currency in Denmark. Since 2010, the Danish government has resorted to generating “ghetto lists” marking out areas as socially problematic for the state. In 2018, the country’s parliament passed “ghetto” laws to further regulate the lives of individuals inhabiting various city areas focusing on their racial and ethnic origins. The legislation constitutes the spear tip of the “One Denmark without Parallel Societies – No Ghettos in 2030” initiative; its target: “non-Western” residents who overbalance the social ledger by concentrating in various city environs.
The “ghetto package”, comprising over 20 different statutes, grants the government power to designate various neighbourhoods as “ghettos” or “tough ghettos”. That nasty formulation is intended to have consequences for urban planning, taking into account the percentage of immigrants and descendants present in that area of “non-Western background”. One Danish media outlet, assiduously avoiding the creepier elements of the policy, saw it as the “greatest social experiment of the century.”
Bureaucrats consider the following: the number of residents (greater than 1,000); a cap of 50% of “non-Westerners”; and whether the neighbourhood meets any two of four criteria, namely employment, education, income and criminality. Doing so enables the authorities to evict residents, demolish buildings and alter the character of the neighbourhood, a form of cleansing that has shuddering historical resonances. Central to this is an effort to reduce the stock of “common family housing” – 40% in tough ghettos by 2030 – supposedly available to all based on principles of affordability, democracy and egalitarianism.
The problematic designation of people of “non-Western background” is also a bit of brutal public policy. It is a discriminatory measure that has concerned the UN Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and the Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (ACFC). In its concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Denmark from 2019, the CESCR urged the country’s adoption of “a rights-based approach to its efforts to address residential segregation and enhance social cohesion.” This would involve the scrapping of such terms as “ghetto” and “non-Western” and the repeal of provisions with direct or indirect discriminatory effects “on refugees, migrants and residents of the ‘ghettos’.”
The use of “descendants” also suggests the importance of bloodline that would have seemed entirely logical to the Nazi drafters of the Nuremberg Laws. The German laws, announced in 1935, made no reference to the criteria of religion in defining a “Jew”, merely the importance of having three or four Jewish grandparents. Doing so roped those whose grandparents had converted to Christianity and the secular. First came the sentiments; then came the laws.
This irredeemable state of affairs has solid, disturbing implications, though both the CESCR and ACFC tend to be almost mild mannered in pointing it out: You did not belong and you cannot belong. It is less an integrating measure than an excluding one. Denmark’s “Ghetto Package”, as the ACFC puts it, “sends a message that may have a counter-effect on their feeling of belonging and forming an integral part of Danish society.” It also urged that Denmark “reconsider the concepts of ‘immigrants and descendants of immigrants of Western origin’ and ‘immigrants and descendants of immigrants of non-Western origin’.”
For its part, the Ministry of Interior and Housing finds the package all above board, a mere matter of statistical bookkeeping. Using “non-Western” as a marker adopted to distinguish the EU states, the UK, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the Vatican State, Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand. “All other countries,” the Ministry curtly observed in a statement, “are non-Western countries.”
Last year, Mjølnerparken, a housing project in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro area, became the subject of intense interest in the application of the Ghetto laws. With 98 percent of the 2,500 residents being immigrants or the children of immigrants, a good number hailing from the Middle East and Africa, the “tough ghetto” designation was a formality. Apartment sales were promised, effectively threatening the eviction of the tenants.
These actions were proposed despite ongoing legal proceedings against the Ministry of Interior and Housing by affected residents. Declaratory relief is being sought, with the applicants arguing that the measures breach the rights to equality, respect for home, property and the freedom to choose their own residence.
Three rapporteurs from the United Nations also warned that the sale should not go ahead as litigation was taking place. “It does not matter whether they own or rent all residents should have a degree of security of tenure, which guarantees legal protection against forced eviction, harassment and other threats.”
Such policies tend to consume the reason for their implementation. Disadvantage and stigmatisation are enforced, not lessened. Former lawmaker Özlem Cekic suggests as much. “It is not only created to hit the Muslim groups and immigrant groups but the working class as well. A lot of people in the ‘ghettoes’, they don’t have economic stability.”
The Ministry has reacted to the protests with proposals that ostensibly reform the legal package. The word “ghetto”, for instance, will be removed and the share of people of non-Western background in social housing will be reduced to 30% within 10 years. Those moved out of the areas will be relocated to other parts of the country. According to Nanna Margrethe Kusaa of the Danish Institute for Human Rights, “the ethnicity criteria has a more sharpened focus on it than before.” Officials have merely refined the prejudice in one of Europe’s most troubling instances of ethnic engineering. To this, Cekic has an ominous warning: “How can you expect [immigrants] to be loyal to a country that doesn’t accept them as they are?”
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
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Learning From Earlier Sudden Outbreaks of Diseases May Be Very
Useful Today
by Bharat Dogra
At a time when the entire world is focused on COVID-19, it is important to recall some important lessons which emerged from the response to previous sudden outbreaks like Ebola infectious disease and other diseases in recent times
To Avoid Very Serious Threats, Superpower Rivalry Should Spare the Space
by Bharat Dogra
A very serious emerging threat concerns the growing extension of superpower rivalry for dominance to outer space. This may relate to economic, technological and even military aspects. Ultimately this may lead not only to new kinds of pollution but in addition also to very big disasters.
Managing Anxiety And Depression In School-Age Children During COVID-19 Pandemic
by Nawaz Sarif
The contagious Covid-19 has stimulated an irremediable health crisis and has increased the burden of mental illness among students.
