A Long Haul towards Safety

Yes, it’s the year 2020; the same year where Phoebe predicted that Emma would be hearing her message from a TV that wasn’t invented back then, living in cities built on air to escape from the “ant people”. But looking at her expectations we seem to have fallen short of them, it’s evident in the way the pandemic is wreaking havoc in the nation. 

It looks like there’s a long travel ahead to develop a fool-proof healthcare system.The coronavirus pandemic has truly highlighted the blemish of all nations affecting each and every country alike; irrespective of the divisions and distinctions men had incorporated into their lives. This failure in the health care system globally has become a lesson for all the world leaders who invested more on hedonism than on trying to build a system that could withstand a global catastrophe. We were so threatened by what one human could do to other, finding ways to destroy one another, if need be, we never invented any protocol to stave off a massive healthcare failure.

It’s not that we would never recover from this apparently ever-escalating situation. We will, at some point of time in the future, grow out of this pandemic, globally, and it would be then up to the nations developed and otherwise to direct their resources into building a system that could survive the next pandemic.

But this has generated a train of thoughts inside my head as to where will India stand after this disease has run its course. Will India be up and about, leading, and setting an example ? Or will it again drown into chaos if a similar situation arises ? 

The future, is only for speculation, but the past, for introspection:

India has always had a rich culture. It’s something on which undoubtedly each and every Indian rests their pride upon, and history attests that India’s healthcare facilities were richer than the rest. Be it the times when the British East India Company relied on our expertise in the fields of medicine or the Dutch and the Portuguese settlers during pre-colonialization who sought our traditional medical attention. But somehow with the passage of time, Western medicinal culture gained the upper hand and Ayurveda lost its prominence. With the advent of western medicine in India there were many revolutionary works on myriad diseases which curbed the spread of epidemics on pan-Indian basis but there was little room to innovation, thanks to the British's penurious policies on the Indian medical sector.

The Indian health care system has developed a lot in the past few decades but it has not reached an optimal position so as to benefit each and every Indian alike. It is highly urban-centric leaning towards the middle and the upper-class society in India. However, the marginalized, impecunious class of Indian society hailing in villages has to rely on homeopathic and rural medical approaches.  
According to the World Economic Forum India has slipped to 150^th rank in healthcare. 

Now, if we focus onto the present, where traditional methods have succumbed to Indian demography, science seems to have seeped through to the rural areas. Science is allowing people with an omnipresent source of care. 

Where due to the shortcomings of the government people were unable to access the healthcare facilities, a technological shift has emerged as the saviour, with healthcare being as far as a click away in our mobile phones.

Even the “MAKE IN INDIA” project to the relief of patients has deflated the cost of medical treatment and medicines by promoting domestic manufacturing of pharmaceutical equipment. When before the doctors where overwhelmed by the number of patients they had to encounter on a daily basis, now sophistication in technology has given them some sense of solace. The amount of knowledge that is flooded over the internet has given people with a chance to scrutinize their conditions themselves, looking for cures and home remedies which has reduced the amount of time that is spent on queues waiting to meet the doctor, along with the consultation fees. 

But where this ocean of information can be a boon to someone, it can also be a bane, because there is no credibility of the information that is posted out on the web. There is so much information into the web that self-evaluating and cross-checking is vital that putting your faith blindly over something written onto the internet can be hazardous to our own self.

It looks like there is a long haul towards safety, but ubiquitous safety and care for all is not something that is hitherto undreamt of. With all the innovations and developments in the field of pharma that India is experiencing, I don’t feel that taking an optimistic stance towards India’s future would misfire.