Doctors in India: the forgotten god
It takes at least 13 years to be a doctor in India. There’re tangible struggles like govt. apathy towards state-run medical colleges and consequently their pathetically substandard condition. There’re also intangible struggles. For example, the choice of male-dominated speciality. And after all this, we as a society offer them threatening for their life. Our country has a huge deficiency of doctors, we need to think!
Since my childhood, I’ve been hearing about how lavish a Doctor’s life is and how the degree of their exhaustion depends on their mood. Hailing from a small town, waiting for long hours to meet a doctor was common, and that scared me going to a clinic. However, I could never ponder over the reasons.
In the same period of my childhood, I also heard stories about doctors being next to god and how some Dr Narendra Babu miraculously saved someone’s life.
In recent times, while being on the ground and working with people related to social issues, I felt aggrieved on various occasions. The occasions where I felt disturbing helplessness at not being able to do something. Visiting a govt hospital and medical college of Mumbai was one of them. There’re issues, in our country which are in dire need of attention, of not just govt., but also of the public. Medical Profession & Heath related infrastructure is one of them.
What does it take to become a doctor in India? A preparation for at least two years to get into a good medical college. Six years of being on bones to graduate, ‘coz unlike engineering one-night study won’t convert into even passing grades. This six-year also involves one year of continuous internship, where the most respectful word one could expect is ‘Aih Intern…do this!’. Then another competition to make it into a good college for PG, if you get lucky to crack it without taking a break for preparations. Another 3 years of sleepless nights and one-meal days. Now you got some value in the market, but to make it big another couple of year to super-speciality. That makes a total of 13 years! 13 years so that you’re a proud doctor. And mind that there’s hardly any window for sneaking out to the other world around.
Unfortunately, in our country, this journey is not only about time, commitment and hard work. It also involves fighting for basic necessities to learn smoothly. The state-run medical colleges often lack minimal essentials like availability of medicines, general equipment, even things like cotton and gloves. The condition of living, which students don’t complain about, once getting habitual, is even more pathetic. Imagine getting a two-hour break for sleeping after some 17 hours of work, and all you got is a gloomy room with fungus and rats. The post-graduating students often have to sleep in the wards on some plastic fabric.
These are tangible aspects, the struggles which are easily visible. There’re always certain aspects which run intangibly. Like personal life. Or social, because in the end, everything is part of a larger society. For example, things become worse when you’re a female and opt for some male-dominated speciality. You’ve to shut a thousand mouths on why not taking gyneco-considered suited for female and why go exceptionally for orthopaedics?
Being a country of 132 million people, it is hard making systems working well in their place. 70 years of independence and yet whom to blame is another discussion. Right now, this is the reality that we lack doctors, that 5 women in India die every hour during childbirth, that we are helpless when 100s of children die in one go. And yet, we choose venom but courtesy. The recent attacks on doctors, verbal or physical, is our choice of ignorance and apathy towards our own realities. Commercialization has somewhat corrupted every profession, and all of us know it, see it, most of us do it. But we expect the medical profession as being truly spotless when they come from our own much-stained society.
In India, one doctor is serving to 1668 people and still, most of us make it back to life after a medical situation, is a reminder, that how much strained is this profession and that most of it are still good. Not just good but passionate about their job of saving lives, ‘coz in the given situation, it won’t work any other way.
This is not about showing sympathy because it takes 13 years or because they’ve to push all their human limits to save a life. This is about accepting reality, being respectful to a profession which saves life. This is about being thoughtful that how much sincerity we expect and how much we’re ready to reflect? This is about asking for basic human rights, from the govt. and the society, for someone who may be saving my or your life someday. ‘Coz it won’t be a happy scene, where doctors have placards in their hands instead of a stethoscope, where they would be marching on streets instead of hospital corridors and …where they would be panicking for their life instead of ours.
