Cutting the lifeline, literally

The week where every headline was about celebrating the 70^th anniversary of the birth of a new nation, an unimaginable tragedy unfolded at a government hospital in Gorakhpur, India. The hospital ran out of liquid oxygen, a lifeline for sick babies and children who needed it to survive. At least 60 died. Whether the hospital ran out of oxygen, or whether the suppliers decided to cut it due to unpaid bills is still being debated. That debate, mired in politics and deflection of blame, is irrelevant for those who lost their most precious treasures.

The situation for little ones in Pakistan is not much better either. During my meetings in Lahore last month, I got to see a number of physicians, including those who work at Children Hospital Lahore, the largest hospital for children in the province. The situation there did not seem much better — and I was told that the children who have to get their biopsies done for cancer testing have to bear unbearable pain. There is not enough anesthesia for them, and a weak local anesthesia is all that is available. The screams, agony and pain of innocent children has become commonplace at the leading hospital in the country.

Life is cheap on both sides of the border. There seems to be a threshold, a bare minimum number of casualties, for it to make news. The initial reaction, by the local government in Uttar Pradesh, was to suggest that on average ten children die in this season at the said hospital. In other words, the loss of life is both routine and not a big deal whatsoever. The fact that it was sixty and not ten, therefore, is a minor blip on the radar of statistics. Across the border in Lahore, when I asked doctors and bureaucrats about the lack of the very basic medical supplies at hospitals, they shrugged their shoulders and said unfortunately this is how it is. In other words, not much can be done to change the system and we need to change the topic of the conversation.

Given the attitude of those in charge and those in power, it is not unreasonable to assume that similar smaller scale tragedies occur routinely. They just do not matter much because the poor die routinely and who is keeping the score anyway. While the reasons for the tragedies in our hospitals are complex, and range from a heavy population burden to lack of resources, corruption and mismanagement, there is only one reason for our indifference. It is our moral failure to recognise the value of the lives of the poor. The system does get any better because we do not care, and those who are the victims of our collective negligence and indifference are weak. Those burdened with the challenges of poverty have little room or ability to have their voices heard. For as long as our indifference, at the individual and collective level remains intact, there is little reason to assume that other aspects of the problem, from resources to management, are going to change.

The horror in Gorakhpur, the situation in Lahore and many such unreported or underreported tragedies across the region that do not meet the casualty threshold, should make us wonder what kind of people have we become? Seventy years on, is the life of a poor baby any more precious than it was in 1947? Perhaps we are better off in having newer technologies, but are we better off in our empathy, recognition of the value of life, and a fundamental desire to protect the children of the poor?

I am asking myself that question — and I hope we all will.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd, 2017.

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