Originally published as part of Khabar Lahariya’s long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G“ ♦
June 18 was a typically busy day in India. In the morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his latest scheme, the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan (loosely translated, Poor People’s Welfare Employment Campaign), this time to benefit migrant workers. Before noon, he had launched a historically significant initiative (under the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan), further opening coal mining to the private sector and auctioning a tranche of blocks in protected forest areas. Meanwhile, as the number of soldiers killed, injured and captured in the Ladakh border incident with China remained slippery, the official coronavirus death toll surged above 12,000 and the number of cases was projected to reach 500,000 within a week.
Despite all this, Modi appeared again in a video released that evening, unruffled in his crisp white cottons and saffron stole, to talk about the initiative that is perhaps closest to his heart. ‘Let’s make yoga popular,’ he said, about an industry currently valued at over $80 billion worldwide. India’s sixth International Yoga Day would admittedly be more muted than usual. Last year, Modi pulled out all the stops in Ranchi, flowing for 30 minutes with a reported crowd of 30,000 people. Between 2015 and 2019, according to the Business Standard, the government spent up to ₹140 crore on Yoga Day, including on publicity and expenses like snacks, sweets, travel and accommodation, and souvenirs.
This year, Yoga Day was going virtual, Modi explained, in keeping with social distancing norms. In an interminable press conference earlier that month, the Ministry of AYUSH had laid out the terms and conditions of a #MyLifeMyYoga vlogging contest, which has since unleashed a torrent of tweets, posts and grams featuring aspiring yogis, astonishingly flexible children and the usual slew of Bollywood celebs.
Yoga ‘ends distance of various kinds’, Modi said in his video. ‘Distance between the life we have, and the life we want to have… The distance between our expectations and reality, which can become a source of stress.’
In other words, keep calm and do yoga.
In the rural and semi-urban districts we cover however, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile the expectations Modi’s many schemes have raised, with the reality of their delivery and impact. There’s a yawning gap between the amount of money, airtime, and other resources taken up by Yoga Day, and its irrelevance to a crumbling public health infrastructure, which no amount of PR stretching can adequately fill.
As migrating labourers return to villages, the lack of quarantine centres and basic health facilities is becoming a bigger burden on the poorer regions of India. In Bundelkhand, health department officials are doing some checking but it appears largely arbitrary. Quarantine protocols have become impossible to enforce, and there are reports of people dodging examination (typically an inconclusive temperature check), or of being cleared and later testing positive.
The safety net that should have been in place is the most ambitious of the central government’s self-aggrandisingly named schemes, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) or Ayushman Bharat, which promises up to five lakhs annually in medical coverage to below-poverty-line families. Despite being launched in Ranchi with great fanfare, and getting Rs. 6,400 crore in the 2020 budget, Ayushman Bharat hasn’t quite lifted off.
Reporting in late May, Khabar Lahariya found a shortage of doctors, nurses and ventilators, and not a single anaesthesiologist at the Government Medical College, Banda. According to media reports, Uttar Pradesh has one government doctor for every 20,000 patients, with thousands of posts lying vacant. At Mahoba District hospital recently, we found 16 vacancies. In 2018, Banda District Hospital had no general surgeon and patients were referred to Kanpur, 150 kilometres away. Primary Health and Community Health Centers are worse. An Ayushman Bharat-covered primary health centre in Luktara village has no doctor at all. In Kabrai, Mahoba, the community health centre was initially locked up during the lockdown, due to fear of Covid-19.
Among the PMJAY’s beneficiaries, confusion abounds due to multiple faltering health initiatives and disorganised implementation. Cards are slowly made or not at all, and there is widespread fraud. The scheme intends to cover the gaps in public care by subsidising private treatment, and even in rural areas, people prefer to go to private healthcare facilities if they can afford them. In an egregious example of exploitative healthcare KL reported last year, a 52-year-old Nathu was turned away from a government hospital for his second leg amputation, despite having an Ayushman Bharat card. He had to sell around 100 square yards of his land to pay for the operation at a private hospital. Private set-ups are also full of quacks, as another amputation story we reported in 2016 illustrated, where a ‘jhola chhaap’ doctor killed his patient on the table.
LOCAL PUBLIC HEALTH HEROES
As thousands of people post yoga videos, it’s easy to wonder whether maybe Indians just aren’t politically invested in public healthcare. Our archived stories of people seeking better medical facilities counters that idea, but their relentless tragedy can only do so much against the shiny glow of yoga marketing. So this Yoga Day, we want instead to celebrate a few local heroes we’ve met, who’ve taken it upon themselves to dream up solutions to the hinterland’s healthcare crises.
Aditya Shivhare, a 12th-class student, is Chhatarpur, MP’s local Tony Stark. We met him last year, when he was feted by local media for his wireless power-transmitting Tesla tower and winning third prize for it in a competition in Delhi. Earlier this month, he showed us his prototype ‘corona-killing bracelet’, armed with 400 nanometer UV light that he said could destroy virus DNA.
Leaving aside the rigorous scientific discussion around personal hand-held UV sanitising devices, Aditya’s enthusiasm is refreshingly infectious. His nickname on LinkedIn is ‘Electro Newton’ and his shirt says ‘Think Outside the Box.’ Pictures of famous scientists watch over his work table, where he tinkers over inventions late into the night. He addresses the scientists as ‘Sir’, as if they are his true teachers. APJ Abdul Kalam smiles down, alongside ‘Sir Einstein ji, Sir Nikola Tesla, Sir Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alexander Graham Bell and C.V. Raman Sir.’ Whenever Aditya feels thwarted he looks at the example of Thomas Alva Edison. ‘He failed 10,000 times when trying to make the bulb.’
Aditya funds his inventions with pocket money and competition prize money. He spent about Rs 200 on the UV-bracelet prototype, he said, but wanted to ‘improve the design and begin mass production… it has yet to become a masterpiece.’ He dreams of being an entrepreneur scientist one day. ‘Doing this work makes me happy,’ he said. ‘And when it’s successful I’m even happier.’
A MASK CRUSADER
When we met them in Tarauha, Chitrakoot, Ramlochan Kushwaha and his family were busy sewing up a storm of facemasks to fill a large order for a medical store. Ramlochan works at the Deendayal Research Institute, where just before the lockdown, he was asked to make masks for the facility’s staff and for distribution in nearby schools. After the lockdown was imposed in late March, he was at home, watching as mask prices shot up. Chemists charged up to Rs. 300 even for cloth masks worth a sixth of the price.
Ramlochan and his family saw an opportunity for public service and maybe a little money on the side. They started cutting and sewing cheap cotton masks, which cost around Rs. 10 each to make. Publicising their initiative on Facebook, they sell at cost or just above to those who can afford the masks, and distribute them for free to those who can’t. Their customers include medical professionals, hospital workers, people in the police force or working in government offices, sweepers, and other essential workers. ‘We give out around 50 to 100 masks daily’ Ramlochan said.
‘We can go through 200-250 meters of cloth in a day,’ he said. ‘Everyone in the family is working on this. We have no other work to do anyway. If someone doesn’t know how to sew, they’re working on cutting the cloth and thread, keeping accounts… Everyone is supporting each other.’
HANDS-FREE SANITISATION
Vinay Kumar, a farmer’s son in Chhatphara village in Banda sees the world around him as one big problem to solve. He’s constantly thinking about how to build machines and improve the way things work, for example inventing a jugaad winnowing machine that several local farmers adopted. Sitting around during the lockdown, he happened to bend his arm to scratch his face and the elbow of his old shirt tore open. He started thinking about the forces at work in the action of his arm, and also about how constant face-touching was a major problem on the frontlines of the pandemic. ‘People keep touching their masks, they keep adjusting them up and down on their faces, which can spread the virus. We touch our eyes,’ he pointed out.
What if every time you touched your face, your hand could automatically be sanitised before infecting yourself? Vinay’s machine–a sanitiser bottle strapped to a head-vice and rigged with a rubber pulley–took him about 15 days to crack. ‘If I move my arm upwards towards my face, the sanitiser will release on my hand, which will disinfect it,’ he demonstrated.
‘Sitting around, you wonder what you can do for your country and people,’ he said. ‘The world’s richest countries are being defeated by this virus–-and our country is already so poor.’ There isn’t enough money or medicine to save poor Indians, he observed. ‘People can rely only on their own minds and thinking to save themselves. So I thought I’d help others by applying my mind.’
Vinay is all for self-reliance, but would also like the government’s help. He even took his device to someone in the government’s science department. ‘They said this is good, but we can’t do anything. We don’t have any provision to promote and improve this invention immediately.’
A SANITIZING TUNNEL AND A MEDICAL MOTORBIKE
Back in April, Narendra Mishra, executive officer of the Karwi Municipality, Chitrakoot was searching online for ways to make his area a little safer. He saw videos from abroad of decontamination tunnels for full-body sanitisation. His eye fell on the ubiquitous desert cooler installed in his office. The germ of the idea for a jugaad sanitisation tunnel was born. Narendra requisitioned a cooler, a bottle of sanitiser, and tenting material, of the kind used in weddings and official functions. After building one tunnel, he planned to replicate the design outside heavily trafficked places, like banks and vegetable vendors.
Filling another gap in public infrastructure is the tri-bike ambulance invented by students of the Polytechnic Mahavidyalaya in Naugaon, Chhatarpur last year. The bike is more maneuverable than the traditional ambulance van, so it can reach people in more remote areas. ‘There aren’t enough proper healthcare facilities in the rural areas around here,’ explained the students’ mentor, lecturer Amit Javan. As the monsoon hits and rains ruin badly built roads, this kind of solution is a boon for emergency patients, particularly pregnant women.
‘Even on such a small level, these students have worked hard to create something so important and necessary,’ Amit said. ‘Through this, they also got to learn, and the message of their capabilities was passed on to the public.’
The point isn’t that these dreamers are saving the world with their public health interventions. But they are prime examples of how even with the most limited of resources, scientific inquiry, rational problem-solving, and solutioneering are a part of our national fabric, just as much as yoga. Celebrating these values, not through mass spectacle, but through real support for rural students is the order of the day. This includes investment in science and other education, and digital access to technical and skilling institutes if the pandemic continues to hamper schooling.
Modi’s emphasis on yoga feels more like a prescription for an obliviating drug than a stress-busting way to reconcile expectations with reality––just one more contortion away from the truth. Lest we forget, on the last two International Yoga Days, Indian and Chinese soldiers threw down some surya namaskars in the very same part of Eastern Ladakh where the Galwan incident took place. The joint exercises made for good photo-ops, but were no substitute for the real diplomacy needed to ease India’s strategic movements in the region.
On June 20, as Modi launched the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan, he announced that it would kick off in Bihar, using the opportunity to praise the sacrifice of Bihari soldiers at the border. The BJP has already started preparing for elections in the state later this year and, just like Yoga Day, the campaign will be mostly digital. Virtual reality suits this government’s ruling style just fine. Above all else, the show must go on.