Howrah, best in healthcare! Where did that come from?

If you are from Howrah, you will always carry certain tags with you all your life. Playing second fiddle to the twin city of Kolkata is just one of them. But little did I imagine that the best healthcare in India would also be one of them. Well thanks to India Today’s survey of India’s best cities, it certainly is. Just like this _Firstpost_ article wonders how Chennai was named the best city , I was left shocked at how Howrah had been declared the best in healthcare…is this the same Howrah? If it is, then it’s a ridiculous conclusion. At best, it is a laughable proposition and one wonders where India Today got their data. [caption id=“attachment_638647” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  India Today rates Howrah as the city with the best healthcare in India. PTI.[/caption] The India Today article (not accessible for free online, as it is a paid edition) rests its case for the best healthcare on two aspects: reported availability of physician or dispensary within a kilometre of home and access to a hospital within 1 kilometre of home. Really? If physical proximity to a hospital or the availability of doctors or physicians determine how best healthcare in the country is to be mapped, then truly god help us. Forget medical or scientific logic, even common sense will tell you that getting to the hospital is just part of the tale. The real ordeal, medical or otherwise, starts when you land in the hospital itself. If proximity to hospitals helps Howrah’s case as the best city in healthcare, then both my paternal and maternal grandfathers would be alive today. Unfortunately, both of them suffered miserably at the hands of a callous and apathetic private hospital in the city that withheld vital information about the patient from us. All this after they had reached the hospital within fifteen minutes of when they had reported the slightest discomfort. Tales abound in Howrah about how the public infrastructure in the city is creaking, non-functional and completely in disarray. The two main government hospitals in the city - Howrah General Hospital and the Howrah Orthopaedic Hospital, run by Eastern Railways, are places where you would not want your loved ones to land in. Sadly, in a city with a huge population of slum dwellers and migrant labourers, that is where they might go. And yes, according to India Today, in time. In all fairness, the article does mention two hospitals - Westbank and Sanjeevan - arguably the better hospitals in the city that attract people from even the twin city of Kolkata. But one wonders how two hospitals can fix the healthcare of a 500-year old city that has suffered tide after tide of apathy and misgovernance from government after government. However, the article does not mention a notable example in public healthcare in Howrah -the Sramajibi Hospital in Belur - that could be the role-model for the entire country in terms of affordable healthcare. It is a hospital built through a workers cooperative and believe it or not - there is a heart operation package for as low as 25000 rupees. The cooperative, built by the workers of the Indo-Japan Steel Works function much like the healthcare initiative of Shankar Guha Niyogi in the poverty-stricken areas of Chhattisgarh. With public healthcare in the entire state in shambles it is unlikely that sporadic private investment in healthcare can pull up the general health situation - be it in Howrah or in the state of West Bengal in general. After having stayed in Howrah for 20 years of my life, I have seen countless people taking the first route out of Howrah to admit patients to hospitals in Kolkata. The situation in Kolkata is no better either with basic fire safety situation, forget specialised medical care, lacking in the best private hospitals like AMRI hospitals, where a massive fire tragedy in 2011 claimed over 90 patients lives, many of them admitted to critical care units. With Howrah having one of the worst internal road infrastructure in the country - with its zero-navigable serpentine lanes and unruly traffic - one wonders how someone would reach the hospital in time even if the hospital is within a kilometre away? So would I care about the India Today survey the next time a loved one has to be hospitalised in Howrah? I doubt it.