Ramadoss: Coercion Once Again

India’s health dictator, Ramadoss, has come up with another coercive idea: to force MBBS students to spend one year in rural India as a condition for getting their degrees.

While this will increase the number of years a student spends to acquire a license to practice medicine, thoughtful people have for a long time been advising the obverse – that is, paramedics with 2 years training can easily serve village India.

Indeed, over 90 per cent of all illnesses that affect our rural population are common infections, mainly water-borne. These can be easily treated by paramedics. Similarly with malaria, another major disease that affects rural Indians.

We can see why such an idea would be against the financial interests of the Medical Council of India; and further, why increasing the time required for getting an MBBS degree would benefit all practicing doctors. The MCI knows it gains when the supply of qualified medics is reduced. And the health dictator, Ramadoss, is actually on the side of the MCI, while pretending to serve the needs of the rural poor.

There is another aspect to bringing medical care to our rural people – and that is transportation. If there are no roads to the village, no doctor is going to be able to reach there. The sorry state of our roads network is an impediment to any good or service reaching the rural people, including medical services.

My reader might be familiar with those highly enjoyable books of James Herriot set in rural England of the 1950s. Herriot was a veterinary doctor whose tales of his practice enthralled the world. But he could conduct his practice only because he had a car – and there were roads to every village in his county.

I have myself spent more than 2 years in rural Goa, and my community was ably served by many specialists who drove there once a week from the big city Margao, 45 kms away, where they lived, in order to consult at a small private hospital a local GP had built near the village. A surgeon, an orthopaedist, a dermatologist, a heart specialist – all served the villagers because they had cars and Goa has rural roads. (These are undersupplied, of course, being extremely narrow: I call them “Goa Constrictors.”)

The problem with our politico-administrative apparatus is that they lack sincerity. Everything they can think of requires coercion – and unjustified coercion at that. And everything they do is just a charade, a false pretence.

“All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us": The song.