Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: Pandemic is Shifting to Rural Areas)

Current Affairs Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination

Pandemic is Shifting to Rural Areas

After overwhelming India’s megacities, the coronavirus is now moving through the country’s vast hinterland.
Home to nearly 70% of India’s 1.3 billion population, the nation’s villages have little access to health care and are struggling to support themselves through the country’s prolonged economic slowdown.

Initially isolated from the epidemic that has swamped the Indian cities, rural areas were exposed when millions of migrant workers who lost their jobs in the cities when the government implemented a strict nationwide lockdown.
The states of Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh received the most number of returning labourers — now they are also witnessing the sharpest rise in new cases.
Unlike the metros with their disproportionately high concentration of super speciality hospitals and doctors, the number of healthcare infrastructure and health providers in the rural regions is abysmally low.
The National Health Profile, 2019, created by the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence estimates the total number of doctors in the most populous State of Uttar Pradesh to be around 77,549. In Bihar, the third most populous State, this number is 72,016.
The contrast with Karnataka with 1,20,261 doctors and Tamil Nadu with 1,33,918 and a smaller State such as Kerala with 59,353 doctors is among the many variables that explain the far healthier Human Development Indices in the southern States. ( The statistics are similar for the number of nurses, midwives, pharmacists, beds and intensive care facilities.

About 5.7 million migrants have been shifted to various destinations across the country by special trains and a further 4.1 million by road transport, according to a government filing in the country’s top court.
Infections have now spread to 98 of the country’s 112 poorest rural districts, up from 34 on April 15, according to the report from NITI Aayog. Nearly 2,250 new cases were added in those districts.
Rural death rates for nearly all infectious conditions are considerably higher than in urban areas.

Covid crisis has proved that there is not much difference in urban and rural India when it comes to health care systems and basic amenities. Both has failed the citizens.
This congestion is most evident in slums in large cities and poses a grave health and environmental challenge.
The health systems in megacities like Delhi and Mumbai are also overburdened and face a shortage of hospital staff and beds.
The urban support under the National Health Mission is just three per cent of the total allocation, while 97 per cent of the funds are set aside for rural areas.
The return of migrant workers from large cities to smaller towns has signalled the significance of the latter. These towns are now forced to provide not just healthcare but also some form of livelihood to those arriving from the big cities.
Oversimplified notions of the rural-urban binary have influenced policy formulation and created huge disparities in the allocation of public resources.

The trends are clear and policy focus needs a similar shift.
The Centre needs to transfer funds and resources. Technology should be deployed to coordinate activities across regions.
The Railways, with immediate access to 3,637 doctors that includes specialists and surgeons, can be roped in as can the nurses and paramedical staff in central hospitals. Time is of the essence here