The following article was written for OpIndia. Pasting it here for reference:
In the run-up to the celebrations
of 75th year of Independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi set a
unique target for the Home Ministry – destroy 75,000 kgs of drugs in 60 days!
As with many aspects of this government, the ministry exceeded this target and
burnt 1,60,000 kgs of drugs in that 60-day window!
Speaking on this topic
in the Lok Sabha, Home Minister Amit Shah laid out in detail the policy of
the Modi government in dealing with the drug menace and provided statistics on
how 62,60,000 kgs of drugs were destroyed in the 2014-2022 period (2023 saw
another 10,00,000 kgs of drugs destroyed). Now, can you imagine all the serious
health problems that have been prevented because of this seizure and
destruction of the drugs? The drugs are valued at nearly 1 lakh crore rupees,
so can you imagine the scale of the burden that was never put on the youth of
this country because of this nearly 200% increase in seizure (compared to the
UPA)?
While we are on the topic of
prevention, I recollect the jabs the elite crowd used to make (or still make)
on the Ayurvedic way of life that the AYUSH
(Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy) ministry
propagates, again often forgetting that it is very difficult to quantify what
is prevented because of following this lifestyle. When Yoga is picked up by the
entire world, it is not because it is a fashion to do so, but Yoga prevents
many a health problem (physical and mental) that cannot be quantified!
We cannot speak of prevention and
not bring up the topic of vaccines, especially the COVID vaccines. Developing
and deploying our own COVID vaccines, especially Covishield and Covaxin, is
perhaps one of our biggest success stories in history. India conducted the
world’s largest and fastest vaccination drive (200 crore doses in 18 months)
and more importantly, everything was digital! The development and deployment of
the CoWIN app that was sought after by other countries too. We had discussed
in detail, back then, how India mastered this process despite one of the
most uncooperative opposition parties and the media.
This ofcourse doesn’t mean people
will not get sick. Often, people living in towns and villages or even in tier-2
cities had to travel very far to get treatment for their health problems. The
proximity to a good health care facility gets resolved if we have more medical
colleges (and therefore hospitals) and more qualified doctors graduate every
year. Up until the year 2014, we had only 387 medical colleges in the entire
country. Today, that number
is at 706 – out of which 157 of them are government colleges/hospitals. The
medical seats under MBBS increased from a mere 50,000 in 2014 to more than 1
lakh in 2023! This basically means that crores of people now can go to a
good hospital closer to their home than spending a lot of time and money to
travel to larger cities.
The Madhya Pradesh government
even started to impart MBBS in Hindi. I am sure that very soon MBBS will be
imparted in many regional languages too. Controversial editor Shekhar Gupta
published an article in The Print in which the author thundered on and on about
how the medical education must remain elitist and be imparted in English only.
This one
article is enough to tell you how the elite are worried about losing out
their bastions, one by one! Anyways, we digress.
While visiting these hospitals, crores
of people in our country do not have to spend money if they are eligible for
the Ayushman Bharat health cards. So far, nearly 30 crore people have been
given the Ayushman Bharat cards which make them eligible to get free
treatment for upto 5 lakhs rupees. So far, Ayushman Bharat has successfully
catered to 6.2
crore hospital admissions worth more than Rs. 79,157crores! Let the number
sink in – 6.2 crore hospital admissions worth nearly 80,000 crores!
Even the medication you will have
to take post this hospitalization has been made really affordable through the
generic Jan Aushadi stores. Though these stores existed before 2014 too, their
number was too small and the probability is very high that you did not even
know these existed. Today, we have a whopping 10,000 such stores across
India.
Through the program Heal in
India, India even increased focus on what is termed as Medical Tourism –
inviting foreigners to come to India to make best use of the very affordable
medical facilities in India, as compared to many western countries. This has
already brought in billions of dollars of revenue to lakhs of people
reliant on the medical industry in India.
Now, think about everything we
just wrote. The equal focus on prevention (drug busts, AYUSH ministry, Yoga,
Vaccines, POSHAN abhiyans) and on cure (more than 100% increase in number of medical
colleges and doctors; more AIIMS across the country; free treatment upto 5 lakh
rupees; affordable medicines closer to your home) has benefitted crores of
families in our country. Which bring us to our core argument - many of these
beneficiaries will willing go to the polling booth and press on the Lotus
button on the EVM, come election day. While the opposition will be busy
screaming that the EVM was hacked, the Prime Minister skilfully shows us how he
hacks them!
In the first two articles of the
series “Decoding
how PM Modi Hacks EVMs” we were speaking about how he was creating wealth through
entrepreneurship and employment. In this third article of the series, we discussed
about how he created wealth through health, and therefore found another way to
hack EVMs!
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