MIDWIVES
Still, illiterate villagers in the desert state of Rajasthan have more faith in private "doctors," and are willing to pay them huge sums.
Surveys show 65 percent of households in India go to private hospitals or clinics or doctors for treatment while only 29 percent use the public medical sector. Even among poor households, only 34 percent use public health centers.
If they use their neighborhood government clinics, it's mostly for diarrhea, tuberculosis and childbirth. For anything more complicated, they have to travel to bigger government hospitals that are often located many kilometers away.
In Rajasthan's Madri village, women with complicated pregnancies have to travel about 50km to Udaipur on a bumpy road cutting through rolling hills to deliver their children. Some die on the way.
As a result, many women still rely on village midwives or dais, who often deliver babies on filthy jute matting with a kit consisting of little more than scissors and mustard oil.
Today, the government and NGOs like Seva Mandir have launched extensive programs to train midwives, but activists say about 1 million women die of complications related to pregnancy and childbirth every year, one of the highest rates in the world.
The other big killer is tuberculosis: every year, nearly 500,000 die of TB and the disease costs India more than US$300 million a year of which more than US$100 million is incurred in the form of debt by patients and their families.
"Medical care has emerged as the second largest cause of indebtedness in the country next to dowry because allopathic [conventional] medicines are very expensive," said public health expert Mira Shiva of the Voluntary Health Association of India.
RSS