Pregnant woman delivers baby in open agricultural field in Uttarakhand

It is shocking that an unfortunate pregnant woman of Maalupati village of Munshiyari in Pithoragarh district was constrained to deliver a baby in an open agricultural field after she developed acute pain while on the way to the hospital in a palanquin held by four villagers who travelled on the uneven path for four hours together but failed to reach the hospital due to the extremely bad roads.

The woman in extreme pain had to be laid on the ground after alighting her from the palanquin who was constrained to give birth to the baby in minus degree temperature. What a shameful, shocking and sorry state of affairs.

This is not the first incident of this kind in Uttarakhand. We have been witnessing such cases of pregnant women in distress in social media sites every now and then in every part of Uttarakhand making open mockery and irony of the extremely deteriorating health services in Uttarakhand. The old persons, women and the children are the worst sufferers.

Though there are district hospitals, in some cases block health centres too but the majority of them are devoid of basic health care amenities and even doctors, not to speak of gynaecologists and surgeons. Not a single hospital except negligible few have ICUs and ventilators. Ultrasound, X-ray machines are seldom available in readied condition. Medicines and simple treatment apparatuses are hardly available.

Hospital staff and doctors are complacent towards patients. In the majority of the cases, villagers have to travel several kilometres on foot to reach the main roads to avail the ambulances which are always in short supply. The basic health and delivery centres which should be mandatory at the block level are conspicuous by their absence. The government of the state which boasts of enhancing the medical and health budget and assuring the inhabitants of the state of improvement in health services etc has in fact not done anything concrete to modernise health facilities in the state with patients suffering from critical illness and ailments dying for want of treatment and pregnant women compelled to give birth to babies on the way under extremely horrible circumstances. This is indeed shocking.

On the contrary, the private clinics, super speciality hospitals and medical mafia are flourishing in the state minting huge monetary profits as patients are constrained to take the expensive services of these super speciality hospitals despite the hard fact that the expensive treatments of these hospitals are beyond their capacity to pay. But they are compelled to manage by selling their lands or houses or picking money on huge interests from money lenders for better treatment and survival. The lawmakers, ministers, bureaucrats and the affluent patients take the services of these super speciality hospitals situated in Uttarakhand or in metropolises of the country the heavy expenditure of their treatment fully borne by the state government. But what about the poor and those hailing from villages? It’s indeed shameful, shocking and disgusting to note that after 19 years of Uttarakhand gaining separate existence our health sector is in jeopardy with pregnant women delivering babies on the way or in open agricultural fields.