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Poverty Amidst Plenty
April 14, 2017
|FRONTLINE
Chennai has a surfeit of medical facilities, but access to health care for the poor and needy remains an issue.
THE CHENNAI METROPOLITAN AREA, SPREAD over 1,189 square kilometres in three districts and home to a seventh of the population of Tamil Nadu, has the best concentration of medical facilities anywhere in the country. From primary care to doctors’ availability to superspeciality infrastructure, Chennai has it all. But this was no accident.
Madras Medical College (MMC) was inaugurated on February 3, 1835. Eye Hospital, Egmore, attached to MMC and the second of its kind in the world, was started in 1819. MMC is also the first medical college in the world to admit a female student, Mary Ann Dacomb Scharlieb, in 1878. Soon after she passed out, she started Kasturba Gandhi Hospital (KGH, earlier Gosha Hospital) in Triplicane in 1885. The first Indian woman to graduate from MMC, Muthulakshmi Reddy, set up the Adyar Cancer Institute in 1954. Of the 32 districts in Tamil Nadu, 17 have government medical colleges—21 colleges in all (22 if the ESI College is included). Again, Chennai and its neighbourhood have the maximum number of such colleges: apart from MMC, Stanley Medical College, Kilpauk Medical College, Government Medical College (Omandurar Government Estate), Chengalpattu Medical College, and ESI-PGIMSR in K.K. Nagar. In addition, there are 19 private medical colleges. According to the Medical Council of India website, 13 of these are in Chennai or the two adjoining districts.
On paper, Chennai has a surfeit of medical facilities, but access to them for the poor and needy still remains an issue. Private medical institutions have to set apart 10 per cent of their bed strength to treat poor patients. But a top medical administrator confessed that he was unaware as to how many of the hospitals followed this in practice. The State government did not push for strict adherence to this principle, and many private institutions which have received government support in one form or the other get away with little oversight.
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