This is shameful. Just as it is shameful that while our infant mortality rate is 60 per thousand live births, tiny Vietnam, only just emerged from decades of war, has an infant mortality rate of 19. While 87 out of 1,000 Indian children die before the age of five, the figure for Vietnam is 23 and for Sri Lanka it is 15.

This disgraceful state of affairs is not because of a shortage of money, although it would help if the Rs 50,000 crore that we have lost on delayed infrastructure projects, as this newspaper pointed out last week, were made available. The problem is that no Indian prime minister to date has found the time to examine what is wrong with the grandiose anti-poverty schemes despite Rajiv Gandhi having pointed out 20 years ago that only 15 paise in a rupee reached beneficiaries.

Government midday meal schemes fail due to pilferage but become instantly successful when an NGO like Akshay Patra starts implementing them. Private Indian healthcare is today as good as the best in the world. So good that the Health Minister boasts of plans to lure millions of medical tourists but corruption and neglect have reduced public healthcare to a farce. Huge expenditure has been made on hospitals that have neither patients nor doctors because the objective of building them was for some politician to line his pockets out of building contracts.

The biggest cause of rural indebtedness is sickness. Everyone knows this but Dr Manmohan Singh’s Health Minister seems more concerned with playing politics at AIIMS.

... contd.