Public Squalour... And Collective Ignorance

New Delhi: May 31, 2008: 0730hrs
Robin Cook, the bestselling author of medical thrillers like Coma, has come out with a new book, Foreign Bodies, which takes a bleak look at India’s medical outsourcing industry – which is booming. Read the news report here.

When my mother was in hospital last year, I found a tall gent from Afghanistan, an old man from Lebanon, and a young African boy in her ward.

Indian doctors are good – and their services are cheap, as compared to the west.

My own friend, a German, came to India for dental treatment, finding it cheaper than home – with a holiday thrown in.

Some are now calling this “medical tourism”: that is, get your by-pass done in Escorts and we throw in a free visit to the Taj Mahal.

Sounds good.

But there are some worrying signs.

For example, the new hospitals are great – but just look at the mess outside. We might attract other Third World types to our medical facilities, but a wealthy westerner will be loath to get medical treatment in horribly dirty cities such as ours.

And this begs the question: Where did we go wrong?

After all, we have been producing good doctors for over 200 years now. My great-grandfather was a doctor.

We have also been producing engineers for long.

But the sorry fact is that we have failed precisely in the area of “social science”: we got our Economics and Political Science all wrong.

Hence the mess.

And there is no way out of this mess because the government controls education in the social sciences. Their propaganda is force-fed to every child in school.

The crucial point I am trying to drive home is this: we Indians have succeeded in science, medicine, engineering, software and other fields related to the physical sciences.

What has let us down is our ignorance of the basic principles of a free and prosperous society.

And this is why the roads outside our swanking new hospitals are broken and rutted, and garbage is strewn everywhere.

Private affluence; public squalour.