• Only 38 per cent of the PHCs have the required number of doctors.
• Only 31 per cent of the PHCs have sufficient stock of medicines..
• None of the villagers are involved in the process running these units. Outsiders, who have very little idea about the real needs of the local community, implement the schemes. Result: people never get what they really require.

This faulty public health system has led to huge disparities in healthcare.

Urban and rural…stand divided
Health facilities in rural and urban areas vary widely. Seventy per cent of India’s population lives in rural areas and only 30 per cent in urban (the number is growing rapidly), but urban areas hog the lion’s share of facilities. As far as hospitals are concerned there are only 0.36 hospitals for every one lakh people in rural areas. While the urban areas have 3.6 hospitals for the same number of people. The PHCs in rural areas do not offer even X-rays or blood testing facilities, which for a city dweller constitutes basic healthcare.

In the rural areas, the percentage of people who have no access to proper care has risen from 15 in 1986 to 24 now.

Doctors…do a disappearing act!
Of what use is a mammoth healthcare system without doctors? But that is a fact. Villagers have no access to any specialised medical care like paediatrics, gynaecology, anaesthesia and obstetrics. Even though 165 recognised medical colleges churn out 12,000 medical graduates every year, the shortage of doctors in the rural areas persists. While one-fifth of them leave the country for greener pastures, most others opt for the private sector. As a result the number of physicians per 1000 individuals is a measly 0.2 in the public health sector.

Private healers
While the public health sector has failed to deliver the goods the private sector has grown by leaps and bounds. It includes a wide range of health care — from the plush corporate hospitals with state-of-the-art equipment, which cater to the medical tourists, to the local quacks.

The average cost of treatment in the private system is 2.1 times higher for rural patients when compared to public health care.

And even after that, they are not guaranteed proper treatment! You see,the private sector operates in a completely unregulated fashion. Some private medics are not even registered doctors!

Poor spend more The poorest 20 per cent of Indians—living in both urban and rural centres—on an average spend 12 per cent of their income on healthcare while the rich spend only 2 per cent. What happens when the poor fall sick? Many have to sell of land or even pledge their children to afford treatment. Pretty drastic, right? But the public health centres are too inadequate. So they opt for private medical care—which is back-breakingly expensive. Did you know that as per the World Bank estimates that medical costs alone pushes down 2.2 per cent of the population below the poverty line each year?