Children Hospitals- Death Beds!

Gorakhpur was just a symptom. Children’s healthcare is ailing across the country, and it gets worse as one goes deeper into the hinterland.

- Pragya Singh in Gorakhpur

It's 9 pm and Gorakhpur’s hipsters are out, all set to cruise town in their swish sedans. The morning’s snarlups are easing—traffic is a pet peeve for townspeople— and the 150-year-old Gorakhpur Club is letting spirits flow. We find here a doctor, a builder and a miner, an assortment of jet-setters. You’d think they count themselves among the lucky in this city, but no. They too start chafing the moment they are made to recall those two days in August last year when 52 people died, 34 of them children, in the city’s largest government hospital. The citizenship of Gorakhpur is like a zone of shared pain and anger.

August 9-10, 2017, is a red circle on the calendar—the day when Gorakhpur hit the national headlines. But those two days only expressed, in concentrated form, a sickness that hasn’t been cured. People say nothing has changed at Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College in this one year. And even that’s only a symptom of what’s wrong, a hint of the sheer enormity of failure. Among medical professionals and policy planners, there’s dismay at the serious shortcomings haunting public healthcare, especially child care, in the whole rural catchment area surrounding Gorakhpur. This is why the middle class and poor, as much as the elite, don’t want their children to grow up here. For the wealthy, the dream is to migrate overseas; the poor want to catch a train to a big city.