Why India needs a conservation act

India should reject its protection philosophy, embrace conservation and bridge gaps between people and officials

I have just returned from an extended tour of our jungles where, as usual, much is being spoken; little is being done to conserve our wilderness. While camping near the Corbett National Park, our cook, also the village leader, was called in every night to help with the elephant menace in his hamlet. He narrated numerous stories of tigers killing humans. Most kills were recent. The so-called man-animal conflict was at its worst and even the forests where I work in southern India we were seeing a spate of escalating conflicts between local people and officials. This got me thinking. Was something seriously amiss with our wilderness policies? On further thought, the answer dawned on me. India does not have its own standalone conservation act. We have the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972; why did we choose not to have the Wildlife (Conservation) Act of 1972 instead?

The first thing that comes to mind is that in conservation one needs to be in constant dialogue with all the players, and certainly our forest officials want no such thing. Dialogue makes one answerable, vulnerable and transparent, actions alien if not loathsome to officials.

Conservation is solely achieved through building trust and respect with all parties concerned. Though transparent dialogue is a crucial part of that trust-building process, the people living near our protected forests are not in dialogue with the officials. This has led to a severe conflict.

‘Protection’ has a very minor but essential part in effective ‘Conservation’. ‘Conservation’ comes first, followed by ‘Protection’. Wherever conservation fails, protection is supposed to kick in. That’s the way it is the world over, except India. When the African countries can have their own conservation laws, why in heavens name doesn’t India have one which stands on its own two feet? Instead of a Wildlife Conservation Act, we have a National Tiger Conservation Authority tucked away, hidden deep in the recess of the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972. But it has only a handful of pages that make a veiled attempt to address the term ‘conservation’.

India is regarded as one of the most corrupt countries. Add to this the fact that our parks and sanctuaries have extensive boundaries, which, in most places remain porous. We have large sensitive forested regions of great value that cannot be effectively patrolled or protected. We have neither the funds nor the political will or the manpower to protect these expansive areas. These areas need to be conserved.

Further, protection is an exclusionary form of management that pushes people away. After more than six decades of Independence, it’s clear that we need to embrace the people living around our protected forests and convert them from being a liability to an asset. Only conservation can do that, not protection. Since 1947, officials and locals have drifted apart at an alarming rate and today a chasm exists between them. This has led to severe conflict. There being no effective dialogue between them, locals in general believe officials to be corrupt and officials on their part think most locals to be smugglers and poachers. This further escalates the conflict.

The officials have lived in denial of such conflicts and over time, instead of calling such a conflict the local man-authority conflict, have evolved a unique term for their failures and called it the man-animal conflict. How could they be answerable for the actions of animals, they would ask whenever the need arose.

It is clear that unless India rejects its protection philosophy and embraces conservation and bridges this gap between people living on the fringes of its forests and the officials and converts these people into assets by including them in the management of her sensitive regions, we can kiss our wilderness goodbye.

We have arrived at this alarming situation because it takes 10 to 15 years, if not a couple of generations, to start the dialogue process leading to effective conservation. Our officers hold their posts for but a couple of years, and fail to share the larger vision. Also because the process of dialogue and trust-building that feeds conservation at most times remains intangible, most funding towards wildlife management gets funnelled into protection. Efforts in any protection activity are tangible and can be measured for the disbursement of funds — examples are anti-poaching camps, vehicles, arms, fences, trenches, roads, fire lines, staff quarters and so on.

Conservation acts suffer because they cannot be measured thus. Conservation can best be described as the ‘human’s ethical pursuit of letting things be in nature’. This natural balance is difficult to maintain as man interferes with nature without truly understanding the consequences. Sadly, whenever man plays god he destroys without having the power to recreate. The writing is on the wall. Forest officials must stop hiding behind the so-called man-animal conflict and the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972. If we are to conserve our wilderness, we need a hard-hitting yet sensitive conservation act that also addresses, as an integral part of conservation, the local people-authority conflict upfront.

No end to battle over land

When the National Democratic Alliance government amended the land acquisition Act through an ordinance last week, it promised to set farmers and industry on an amiable path to mutual benefits and development.

Land acquisition under the 1894 Act had been marked by violent protests, even police firings at farmers. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act, 2013, is the first law on acquiring land post-Independence. Does this ordinance amending the law before it was even fully implemented make the acquisition of land more transparent and fair?

Non-transparent resource allocation

The LARR Act was passed unanimously by all political parties last September. Commenting on the changes back then, Vinayak Chatterjee, Chairman, Confederation of Indian Industry’s National Task Force on Infrastructure, said: “The term ‘public purpose’ has now been clearly defined. The misuse of this clause under ‘eminent domain’ was the bane of the earlier legislation. It led to forcible, heartless acquisition programmes as well as ‘lazy acquisitions where acquired land was hugely in excess of needs or just left unutilised.’”

After the ordinance was passed last week, Mr. Chatterjee maintained, “All I can say is I am positive about the ordinance as it includes public-private partnership for social infrastructure in the exempt category.”

Among the main changes, the ordinance exempts special categories of projects from the requirements of social impact assessment (SIA) and obtaining consent of affected families mandated by the LARR Act. It dilutes the time limit of five years put on projects, after which if land remained utilised, it would go back to the landowner. Instead, the period of five years has been substituted by unspecified period. Another dilution is of the “retrospective clause” to exclude time spent under litigation in cases where a stay order has been passed.

CAG Report revelations

A month before the ordinance was cleared, a Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) report on special economic zones (SEZs) was tabled in Parliament. It found that of the 45,635 hectares of land notified for the development of SEZs, no operations had taken place in 38 per cent of the notified land even after several years of acquisition. It criticised developers, including Reliance, DLF and Essar, for acquiring land but using only “a fraction of it.”

“Many tracts of lands were acquired invoking the ‘public purpose’ clause,” it noted. For instance, the CAG found that the Mukesh Ambani-promoted SEZ in Navi Mumbai had got over 1,250 hectares of land at Dronagiri in Maharashtra in 2006 for a multi-product SEZ. But no industrial unit had been built on the land till now. The CAG found that several industrial houses had raised loans of Rs. 6,309.53 crore mortgaging leasehold government land.

The SEZs, along with private health and educational institutions, are in the broad category of public-private social infrastructure projects now exempted from the SIA’s scrutiny and consent clause under the ordinance. “By giving up the consent clause, you are opening the door for forcible land acquisition which is not acceptable and should not happen under any circumstances. By giving up SIA, you are opening the door for diversion of land,” said Jairam Ramesh, under whose tenure as Union Rural Development Minister the LARR Act was passed in 2013.

While industry bodies such as the CII have welcomed the ordinance, describing it as a sign of the government’s “serious commitment to economic reforms,” farmers’ unions have announced protests when Parliament meets for the Budget Session. “Hundreds of farmers were martyred protesting unfair acquisition. The Modi government has done this to hand over land to acquire land and hand it over to builders and industry,” said B.S. Rajwal, president, Bharat Kisan Union.

Environmentalists, too, have questioned the dilutions in favour of developers. “The government wants to empower companies to acquire land and do nothing with it. The ordinance says five years, or a specified time period whichever is later, but it does not say who will specify this time period, can it be changed or extended,” pointed out Shankar Gopalakrishnan of Campaign for Survival and Dignity.

Intensifying conflicts

A study released by a U.S.-based think-tank, Rights and Resources Initiative and Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development, studied Supreme Court and High Court judgments from the past 10 years, and newspaper reports on land disputes and found that land conflicts affect one-fourth of India’s 610 districts. In instances such as the ongoing struggle over POSCO land in Odisha, the Bengaluru-based Alternative Law Forum found that between 2006 and 2012, 230 cases were filed against over 2,000 villagers resisting POSCO.

Several of the conflicts have resulted from takeover of agricultural and irrigated land. But the ordinance dilutes the provision in the 2013 to acquire multi-crop, irrigated land only as a last resort but exempting special categories.

“Even if the company offers Rs. 50 lakh, we will not give up agricultural land,” said Deepak Das (35), who leads the North Karanpura Bachao Samiti in Hazaribagh in Jharkhand and is an accused in four cases related to land acquisition protests. The samiti comprises over 10,000 families at 23 villages in Hazaribagh opposing a NTPC project to mine coal here since 2005.

The land ordinance does little to check the real bottlenecks posed by cronyism, lack of accountability or arbitrariness in the decision-making processes. A “reform” such as this may fail to check social conflict with little improvement in vital infrastructure.

Big role for small national park in saving threatened butterflies

One of the smallest national parks records one-fifth of the country’s species

Gorumara National Park, one of the smallest national parks in India, has turned out be a safe haven for butterflies as evident by recent studies that have recorded more than 330 species of butterflies in the park.

There are about 600 known species of butterflies in West Bengal and about 1,500 in India. Gorumara alone accounts for more than half of the species found in the State and about one-fifth found in the country.

The park, located in the State’s Jalpaiguri district, covers an area of only 80 sq. km., and has recorded at least four species of butterflies that have never been found in the State before.

Of these, the Bicolour Cupid and Malayan Nawab are placed in Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and the Witch and the Branded Young Fly are in Schedule II of the Act. Animals and insects who are most threatened are slotted in Schedule I of the Act.

Among the 330 species, about 50 are placed in the different Schedules of the Act. Four species of butterflies belonging to Schedule I, 39 species in Scheduled II and seven species categorized in Scheduled IV can be found in the park.

“About 314 of the butterflies were recorded initially as part of an inventory building exercise and published in the form of a book. After the publication about 15 more species have been found,” Sumita Ghatak, Divisional Forest Officer, Wildlife Division II Jalpaiguri told The Hindu.

Representatives of Nature-Mates Nature-Club, a city based non-government organisation, working on wildlife issues, said that the work for identification of the different kinds of butterflies which started in 2012, is still continuing now.

“Apart from being home to animals like elephants, rhinoceros, gaur, leopard and different kinds of deer, we have recorded a huge collection of lesser-known but interesting species of butterflies,” Arjan Basu Roy, a representatives of Nature-Mates said.

Challenge paralysed by society

Our Prime Minister’s call to focus on zero defect manufacturing quality is certainly the correct direction for India’s future. Referring to the IT sector as showing innovation and research prowess 25 years ago, he bemoaned that India is yet to create something pathbreaking like Google, while talent has left the country. Undoubtedly, IT/ITES grew to $86 billion annual exports, but how much adaptable innovation has happened in this business size is debatable, while research investment has been miniscule.

Innovation is a big word, we use it all the time in India, but without capability to produce digital technology basics like hard discs. Thailand is dominating this market. Even the Japanese, Koreans, and now Chinese are incredible adaptable innovators in multiple domains, not fundamental inventors. Where are India’s engineers making wafers and semiconductors in India?

I’m sure our government is better facilitating technical paperwork to ease business nowadays. The real problem is elsewhere though. It’s in capability building that requires extreme behavioural change to match global standards and an entrepreneurial bent of mind. For manufacturing to acquire an edge, we need engineers dedicated to hardcore engineering, and well-trained, disciplined, capability-driven workforce. But look at the cream of our engineers jumping to MBA finance, marketing or HR without even trying out R&D or manufacturing in India. I asked some brilliant 24-year-old IIT-plus-MBA working people, why don’t we hear of 18-year-old Indians having an innovative or entrepreneurial bent of mind?

Several angles emerged in answering this question. Parents in India, they said, want the son to score high marks in school and college, get a high salaried job; the vision for the daughter is wealthy husband and reputable family. Making it to IIT is really tough, they explained. During their past two years in school, they enrolled for special and expensive coaching classes to learn engineering fundamentals to prepare for IIT entrance exams. Children continuously feel, often unstated, pressure from parents when choosing the education stream in high school. Science, required for engineering and medical studies, is always first priority. You need high overall marks to take science. So by default, arts or commerce students are considered less intelligent. Even when good in science, these young professionals said avoiding coaching class was unthinkable because basics are not properly emphasised at school. What’s worse, even with rigorous external coaching they may not make it to IIT.

Why go for competitive IIT, when so many engineering colleges exist? “The job market recognises IIT as top of the pile.” Having become an IIT engineer, why go for MBA? They answered, enterprises value MBA graduates over engineers, it’s obvious from starting salaries where MBAs get double the remuneration. Engineers wanting to pursue an engineering profession find Indian research institutes, R&D labs or corporate engineering positions do not offer the right scope of scientific or engineering work, the payscale is dismal, nor do such jobs enjoy mainstream status. For higher education, IIT graduates try going abroad as MTech or doctoral studies, even in IITs, do not match the high standard of western universities. But an IIT-plus-MBA, especially IIT-plus-IIM is every parent’s dream come true. This upwardly-mobile education gets the best job offers, highest societal recognition, uppermost starting salary, all without having any work experience. “There’s further hierarchy: IIT-IIM with finance specialisation tops all! Such a student was even offered R1 crore annually.” What’s the real difference between IIM and IIT-IIM? “The IIT-IIM definitely has better analytical ability and structured discipline at the start, but after sometime, there’s no difference.” It’s disgraceful how we misuse pure engineering professionals.

Crunching marks to family pressure somewhat explains how societal systems paralyse self-expression, denying our young generation the scope of an inventive bent or entrepreneurial mindset. Here’s where the Prime Minister should start his real brainwashing to displace this culture. When children are dependent and protected like treasures by rich parents, their inventive or entrepreneurial inclination go out the window. When parents don’t have money, children become street urchins. On the other hand, I’ve professionally experienced that less educated people in the practical field like plumbers, electricians, auto or electronic mechanics, now the mobile phone repairers, have a huge bent for entrepreneurship. Such working-class individuals are vast in number, but not valued in society. Here again the Prime Minister needs to strongly support their intellectual development. They can translate their working knowledge into adaptable innovation, but they need the right skill guidance, not through pedagogy but with practical training.

I’m very encouraged by a start-up by one of my client friends. The past 12 years I’ve known Vibhu Hajela, he’d often ask about entrepreneurship as I’ve written about it several times, and I’ve always encouraged him. This 52-year-old mechanical engineer MBA with 27 years of rich work experience, earning annually half a crore of rupees suddenly called last year to say he’s left his job to start a plastic injection moulding factory. He knows he has to generate working capital to continue, and will miss the luxury of good salary at month’s end. I’m sure “Make in India” will succeed with this kind of SME initiative, and the government will support such start-ups. I must add that Vibhu’s wife was extremely supportive of his entrepreneurial drive.

There are several young Americans, school/college dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, among others, who invented in a garage or cellar, then successfully marketed their inventions. Thomas Alva Edison left school from age seven because his teacher said he was confused. His mother educated him at home, encouraging him to follow his scientific bent of mind. Edison spent all his pocket money buying chemicals for experiments. He invented the microphone, telephone receiver, stock-ticker, phonograph, movies, office copiers, incandescent electric lights, and owns 1093 patents. When Edison died in 1931, his assistant, Russian-born, Paris-trained chemist Martin Rosanoff said, “Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.”

Jan Dhan Yojana crosses 100-mn mark Ministry claims 98.4% households now have bank accounts

The ambitious plan of the government to achieve financial inclusion for all has taken a step closer to its target with 98.4 per cent household in India having bank accounts. Under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, unveiled by Prime MinisterNarendra Modi on 28 August last year, 26 January was set as the deadline to open 75 million bank accounts. The target was later revised to 100 million.  

“In the last three months, 103 million new accounts have been opened under the Jan Dhan Yojana. By now, 98.41 per cent households in the country are covered under the scheme,” said Hasmukh Adhia, secretary, department of financial services.

Banks managed to achieve the stiff target of opening 100 million bank accounts a month before the deadline of 26 January.

Adhia said banks had conducted a survey of 219 million household. Of these, 98.4 per cent respondents said they have a bank account. According to the last census, there are 250 million households in the country. “There are 3 crore to 4 crore (30 million to 40 million) who are from the effluent sections of the society declined to take part in the survey,” Adhia said. Adhia added that RuPay cards have been issued to 79.7 per cent of the accounts. The government is also working on seeding theAadhaar number with the bank accounts; 33 per cent of the accounts have already been synced with the Aadhaar numbers. At present, it is not mandatory for accounts to be seeded with Aadhaar for direct benefit transfers (DBT). But the banks have been advised to do so to make DBT transfers easy.

However, a majority of accounts are still inactive with zero balance, and it is a big challenge for the banks to mobilise savings in these accounts.

“We will be deliberating on how to keep the accounts active. We will have to see how to mobilise savings rate from 30 per cent currently to 35 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). We will also have to see how to use these accounts for DBT, pension distribution and other benefits,” added Adhia.

To deepen financial inclusion now, the finance ministry will be getting into an “open challenge mode” for opening accounts under the Jan Dhan scheme.

This will be announced once the 100 per cent target is achieved. “Under this, anyone who does not have an account can approach a bank and an account will be opened immediately,” said Adhia.

There is a need to make history more inclusive

It is unusual, if not sacrilegious, to invite a person who does not have history bred in his bones to a conclave of men and women steeped in the intricacies of a much talked about but inadequately understood human pursuit that dwells on the past and seeks to enlighten or confound the present. I, therefore, deem it a great privilege to be invited by the Indian History Congress to inaugurate its 75th session.

My own academic discipline in the distant past was political science and I do recall Professor John Seeley's jingle, well-known in my time and presumably not forgotten today, that "History without political science has no fruit and political science without history has no roots."

In more recent times, and for professional reasons, I came to value Winston Churchill's aphorism: "Study history, study history; in history lies all the secrets of statecraft."

Historians at all times have endeavoured, as Herodotus put it, "to preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done." Historians have dwelt on the facts of the past and sought to make implicit or explicit judgements about those facts. Not to be ignored is a mid-nineteenth century caution that historians "have been seduced from truth not by their imagination but by their reason" pursuant to the impulse of "distorting facts to suit general principles."

Equally hazardous is the propensity to read the past into the present or the present into the past; so is the temptation to ignore the distinction between memory and history. Memory is based on identification with the past and is unavoidably egocentric, while history is based on its treatment as an external object and not a part of the self. History also cannot be faith-based. The domains of the two exist separately and conflation does not further the cause of either. To a lay person, a number of questions are unavoidable. What then is history, and with what does it deal? What is the task of the historian? Is history a science, or an art, or a bit of both?

A simple answer is that it is a method of inquiry, which deals with what has reportedly happened and not exactly as it happened. It is a narrative of change. It has been suggested that historical objectivity is seen to be not a single idea but rather sprawling sets of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations and antipathies. It is evident that on most if not all occasions, the narrative is contested. Such contestations nevertheless need to have a basis in facts, demonstrable and logically sustainable. As E H Carr put it, "the historian without facts is rootless and futile; facts without their historian are dead and meaningless." He added that "the study of history is inescapably the study of causes." This would exclude what has been called "counterfactuals" or the "what if" category and its simplistic assumptions and premises.

It is thus evident that methodology is critical to the study of history. Efforts to curb "intellectual efflorescence" through official dicta can only be viewed as undesirable. Furthermore, contestations over the historical past need civility of discourse to ensure that it does not cross the imperatives of ensuring social peace and societal cohesion. Carr also dwelt on history's wider relevance: "an individual stripped of memory finds the world a confusing place: a society with no sense of history is unaware of where it has come from or where it is going."

Is there a more practical relevance of history? To my mind, it helps us know and learn from the mistakes of the past. Those mistakes relate to frailties in judgement leading to mistakes in statecraft and governance. These as one historian has put it, could be due to tyranny or oppression, excessive ambition, incompetence or decadence, and folly or perversity. In each, the inability or the unwillingness of society or its ruling establishment to pay heed to reason and realism, to dissentingopinion and to alternative courses of policy or action, led to unfounded certitude resulting in mistakes. It is for this reason that in every period of the past, beginning perhaps with the 30th century BC Egyptian King Menes, codes for dispensing justice were enunciated. Alongside, manuals were penned for the guidance of rulers. Departures from these and the resulting consequences is what historians have dwelt upon.

History writing, and history teaching, has a contemporary relevance in a more evident sense. We live in a world of nation states but the idea of a homogenous nation state is clearly problematic. Diversity is identifiable even in the most homogeneous of societies today. The global scene in modern times has been replete with complexities and tensions of what has been called the national question.

In our own country the sheer diversity of identities, 4,635 communities according to the Anthropological Survey of India, is a terse reminder about the care that needs to be taken while putting together the profile of a national identity. It has of necessity to be liberal and accommodative; marked, to quote an eminent scholar, neither by complete homogenisation nor by the particularism of closed communities. Instead, it is a balance struck by "the mutual gravitational pull of disparate sections that make the whole." Our sagacity in building pluralist structures that have stood the test for over six decades, stands in contrast to many strait-jacket edifices in other societies that came to grief. By the same token, these structures need constant nurturing.

It is no longer a matter of debate that history has to be more than narrowly political or economic. The imperative is to make it comprehensive and inclusive of neglected groups in society. These subaltern classes, as Gramsci had pointed out, are not unified and their history, therefore, has to be intertwined with that of civil society. It has challenged what has been called "the univocality of statist discourse." It has sought to focus on Dalit and gender issues. The methodology of studying these opened up new and enriching vistas of study for historians.

The pasture of stupidity, said the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun, is unwholesome for mankind. He warned historians not to succumb to the "temptation of sensationalism", adding that "a hidden pitfall of historiography is disregard for the fact that conditions within nations and regions change with the change of period and the passage of time."

The great Indian healthcare challenge

Last week I was at a private hospital in Kolkata when I came across the family of a patient who was admitted in the Critical Care Unit (CCU). The breakdown of the current bill for the patient, which the family shared with me, showed the CCUcharge alone at around Rs 8,000 ($129) per day. Of course, this is just a small part of the bill, and only the first day's. In a country where the per capita monthly income is less than Rs 7,000 ($112), these are exorbitant prices for even middle-class households like the one I met, let alone the poor.

So why wouldn't they opt for treatment at a government hospital where prices are subsidised? Because - the family told me - they wanted the best facilities and doctors, which they believe were simply missing in state-run health facilities. The family has had to dip into its savings. It is not unusual in India where out of pocket payments (OPP) or direct cash outlays by individuals/families for healthcare account for more than 70 per cent of total health-related spending. To put things in perspective, consider that the concomitant figure in the US is below 12 per cent.

There are three aspects to the problem at hand: (a) the poor state of government hospitals (broadly lacklustre state participation in the health sector as a whole); (b) the choice citizens make in favour of private healthcare; and finally (c) poverty and health inequality. It is well known that poor Indians who dip into their family savings to pay for privately-provided healthcare often plunge back into the below-poverty-line (BPL) zone as critical illnesses potentially wipe out a lifetime of savings. Remember that even a 0.5 per cent increase in poverty would mean an addition of 6 million BPL households in India.

The three aspects highlighted above are distinct but connected to each other, with each feeding into the other.

The first disturbing reality is that there is a near absence of either a comprehensive/universal state-sponsored insurance programme or a publicly-funded health system in India. The piecemeal health schemes that exist are reportedly marred by ineffective implementation, poor health infrastructure to back up, and even corruption. With the turn of the millennium, India opened up health insurance to private players, but the latter play a marginal role in the health insurance market. Existing public health insurance programmes (by way of employee/ employer contribution) put together cover not more than a quarter of the total population. Importantly, these schemes exclude 51 per cent of Indians who are self-employed (auto-drivers, housemaids, farm labourers and what have you).

The Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana does cover BPL households and its implementation by states has had tangible effects on curbing private expenditure. However, a lot of the dispensaries and hospitals in India's overall public health network lack doctors, beds, medicines and surgical and other infrastructure. Clearly, more state funds need to be channelled to the sector.

Government health expenditure as a percentage of GDP in the US is higher than seven per cent and ranges between six and eight per cent in EU countries. At 1.4 per cent of total GDP, India's state expenditure compares lowly against even other developing countries, leave aside the OECD. India's bed-to-patient and doctor-to-patient ratios (basic parameters) are way below global averages and even below the WHO's minimum ratio stipulations. This situation is fundamentally owed to government hospitals, particularly in remote parts of the country.

On the other hand, across India today, the very word 'private' evokes efficiency. And this perception has penetrated the psyche of ordinary Indians - poor, affluent and those in between. Irrespective of income situation and the impact on domestic finances of making such a choice, a large majority of Indians (an estimated 75-80 per cent) prefer to avail private healthcare facilities for minor and major illnesses. However, unless the situation with public healthcare provision improves substantially from where it is today, we can't even begin to consider reflecting upon the issue of citizen's affinity for the private sector as being a 'problem'. It is safe to assume that people will respond with their feet if government facilities are adequately shored up and brought in line with the advanced diagnostic and treatment facilities of our times.

The Social Progress Index, which ranks countries based on developmental outcomes, ranked India as low as 95th and 97th in the 'Health and Wellness' and 'Nutrition and Basic Medical Care' sections respectively. In the more popular Human Development Index (HDI) India ranked a miserable 135ththis year. Indeed, we don't need global indices to tell us how serious the health policy problem in India is. The situation merits a range of measures: increasing state spending in the sector and beefing up government health infrastructure is a good place to start. A focus on basic hygiene andsanitation meanwhile can aid in prevention. On the cure side, broad-basing and streamlining existing insurance schemes under one umbrella will ensure better delivery and implementation.