HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

Rural India’s desperately inadequate health infrastructure is common knowledge. But official estimates understate the crisis, which makes the battle against the pandemic even harder

- KAUSHIK DEKA

Ojhauli is a nondescript village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gola tehsil, 50 km from Gorakhpur, the home district of chief minister Yogi Adityanath. In the past month, this village, with a population of about 4,500, reportedly saw 30 deaths preceded by Covid-like symptoms. However, there was no response from the nearest community health centre (CHC), located in Gola. On May 20, Neelranjan Ojha, a native of Ojhauli, reported the deaths to Himanshu Thakur, the district Panchayati raj officer of Gorakhpur. Immediately after, a team of health officials arrived at the village and eight people were admitted to a Covid hospital in Gorakhpur.

State officials in Maharashtra have been similarly lax or late in responding to Covid cases in rural areas. Around 20 per cent of the state’s daily Covid tests are being conducted in Mumbai alone, which accounts for just 1.5 per cent of the population of Maharashtra. In rural districts such as Ahmednagar, Buldana, Satara and Beed, among others, where the positivity rate is 23-30 per cent, the number of daily tests is below 5,000. In the second week of May, controversy also erupted in Beed after the district administration failed to add 240 Covid-related deaths to the state’s tally.