Never are these callous attitudes as manifest as they are in the country's public health system. On Monday, it took court intervention to hold the medical superintendent of the Rajan Babu TB Hospital and the city police accountable for the death of a TB patient through rank negligence.

The facts of the case are as usual horrifying. Instead of receiving the timely medical attention he obviously required, the victim was first left unattended and then subjected to wrong treatment at the hands of inexperienced doctors. An intercostal tube which should have been inserted into his chest was instead implanted in his stomach. This caused his death within a matter of minutes.

What followed is so familiar that it is easy to imagine. Doctors, even if they may be pathetic when it comes to medical expertise, are veritable geniuses when it is a matter of organising a cover-up for their blunders. In this instance, the police officers at the Mukherjee Nagar police station mysteriously dragged their feet over filing an FIR on the case.

India is estimated to have 2 million TB patients, which accounts for 28 per cent of the world's total. Clearly, it is one of our more serious medical challenges and if we don't have functioning systems to combat this disease, the country may as well shut down its public health departments. After all, what does public healthcare amount to, if it means only death in a public hospital?

If Alexander Solzhenitzyn were to have written his classic work, Cancer Ward, in an Indian setting, he may well have chosen to call it `TB Ward'. So pervasive is the disease, so dismal are the facilities to treat it, that the TB ward has become synonymous with death row in this country.