TAX THE RICH

India's billionaires pay a small percentage of their wealth as tax. It makes sense to squeeze them a bit to finance the country's Viksit Bharat dreams

- Parth Singh

Delhi is the most polluted city in the world. Each winter, its air thickens until it feels like breathing inside a flour mill. The haze settles over everything. It crawls into homes. It clings to lungs.

And in this weather, if one has to sleep on the pavement outside India's biggest government hospital for treatment, life itself can feel existential. Priyanka, a 30-year-old from Haryana battling a knot in her back, is living proof of what illness means when you are poor in India.

“There is no other option,” she says, shivering in the cold and polluted night outside All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in South Delhi. Around her, patients camp out on the cold concrete because they have nowhere else to go. They have travelled across the country with nothing but hope. Life narrows into a fight for breath, even as the city around them moves on.

It is a struggle Jyoti knows too well. “It took us four months just to confirm that my father had cancer,” she says. Her father, 67-year-old street vendor Sundar Lal from Raebareli, Uttar Pradesh, spent nearly a year shuttling between Delhi's Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital and AIIMS. What began as a festering ankle wound ended with the removal of one of his lungs. By the time he was finally admitted in November, the family had lost its income, and Jyoti had lost a year of her education.

Doctors and economists say India's premier government hospitals are overcrowded not because they are too successful, but because the system below them is too weak to hold. District- and state-run hospitals, starved of funds and stripped of expertise, cannot absorb the weight of demand. As a result, studies point out that India's out-of-pocket health spending is among the highest in the world, a burden that extracts a punishing price.