Seventy per cent of our population lives outside the cities but eight out of ten doctors and a shocking 80 per cent of all hospital beds are urban. Every preventable malady, like tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, is many times more prevalent in rural India; so are infant and maternal mortality.
The government wades through its five-year plans, trimming health expenditure to levels below that of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and blindly enforces laws pertaining to healthcare. Take the example of blood transfusion. The government insists on blood banks, even though they are notoriously...

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