Women’s Health & Safety
Two pieces of news that caught my attention.
Item 1. India’s maternal mortality rate is still a 450 deaths for every 1,00,000 live births, which means that atleast 4 out of every 1000 women who deliver a child, will die. The causes are many : early marriages and early child-bearing, malnutritioned bodies too weak to carry a child, poor knowledge of and access to contraception, social norms that encourage bearing of many children early and of course one of the biggest ones - little access to doctors or trained nurses, and corruption even when such facilities are available. The Health Minister is no doubt too busy clamping down on banning cigarette smoking in public places. Not that I think second hand smoke is a good idea, but Ramadoss’ single-minded pursuit of smoking in (mostly) urban areas, in a country with much more serious issues such as a high MMR, diseases such as TB, cholera etc does make you wonder.Â
Item 2. Mrinal Pande writes about how women in Western UP are increasingly taking to owning firearms, both for their safety and as a status symbol. While no doubt, many women in that part of the country would feel safer with a gun around them, one has to question this lawless culture which encourages women to take up arms.Â
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Apu, with due respect, while you are justifiably angry that more is not being done about MMR, I think a little more perspective is in order. Diseases of the lung, arteries and throat related directly to tobacco use account for an estimated 0.7 million or more deaths in India, while the corresponding number for TB is about half of that and MMR is only a tenth or less of that. Now, tobacco related deaths are disproportionately high in men, but still the numbers have been very high for tobacco-use related deaths. If anything, I think Ramdoss deserves a lot of credit for this dogged pursuit to target tobacco use, as it is the leading preventable cause of death in India. Politics aside, it is rare to find a minister in office determined to make an impact on a particular issue (pet issue, though it may be), which in the case of controlling tobacco use, is perhaps the most crying health need in India. So, your labeling other things including MMR as “much more serious issues” does not hold much water. They are all serious issues, but clearly the numbers do justify his focus.
S, perhaps my comment there looked like I am saying that one set of diseases/problems must be privileged over another. That’s not what I mean. Tobacco consumption in various forms is certainly a huge issue - but what Ramadoss is attacking is certainly not ‘tobacco consumption’ as such. What he is doing is addressing a very small part of the problem, which is urban India and even there, he can’t do much since banning smoking in public places itself is not a solution. But, of course, it gets him in the media.
Now contrast that with basic health care infrastructure which is in shambles all over the country - and this is needed to treat not just MMR, but as I mentioned, also other things like TB, cholera, other infectious diseases, jaundice and even simple things like dehydration from which thousands of Indian infants die every year. MMR itself is a small sample, but put all these other things together, and then what would the numbers say? Then, is the focus on smoking in a restricted urban environment justified?