Rural India. A third of our population lives in rural India. The COVID-19 pandemic has now entered rural parts of our country and these areas are now carrying twice as much as disease burden as the urban and semi-urban areas.
The hospitals in our cities are towns are overloaded and overwhelmed. Our rural infrastructure is in danger of collapsing. We lack testing kits, drugs and trained healthcare professionals. Village residents have no option but to travel for hours to try and get a hospital bed. In the recent decades, we have never seen so many people dying, so quickly, and at such an alarming pace.
The Central Government has released an SOP on Covid-19 Containment and Management in peri-urban, rural & tribal areas. The SOPs are welcome, but how best can translate them where they matter most- in the villages? Were we unprepared for the surge of the virus in rural India? What measures can now be put in place to revamp our primary health systems that have, in many parts, been consistently ignored, under-staffed, under-equipped and under-funded for decades?
Zubeda Hamid interviewed me in The Hindu on the misery rural India is going through as the Covid virus invades the small towns and villages… 25-minute-long Podcast.
