A
kind of report card for several sectors of administration in the MP government
was released the other day by a locally printed national daily. Several
headlines as given below were revealing:
11.
“Three farmers committed suicide
everyday in 2015”
2.
“State records most suicides due to
mental disorders – 1227 deaths”
3. With 625 deaths state fourth in student
suicides.
“Bhopal tops in deaths at railway
crossings, state ranked fourth”
4.
“Accidental deaths: MP second in India, Bhopal
tops megacities”
5.
“MP reports second highest deaths
during pregnancy”
These
headlines do tell us something about the failures of the state administration.
What stands out is that life in the state is cheap and easily dispensable.
People commit suicide in large numbers and among them are people from the most
precious sections like farmers and students. Farmers’ suicides have virtually
become a national phenomenon. Whether in MP or Maharashtra or Telangana or some
other regions in the north or south, farmers are getting increasingly hit by
climate change that has led to crop failures rendering them unable to pay back
loans at usurious rates of interest. Though it does need courage and guts to
end one’s life yet for the farmers driven to desperation it appears to be a
softer option.
What the state could have done to alleviate
farmers’ sufferings was to prepare them for climate change that was being so
feverishly talked about for more than a decade. What it has begun now could
have been done a few years ago as the threat of climate change was hovering
around for quite some years. The climatologists’ prognoses of climate change in
India had clearly indicated that central part of the country, Madhya Pradesh
and Chhattisgarh, would be hardest hit by the rise in temperature or floods or droughts,
etc. Thankfully the government has now devised strategies to enable the
farm-dependent population to meet the threat of climate change. A warming
planet needs suitable reorientation of agricultural practices, especially to
enable the crops to develop resistance to variable temperatures or rainfall.
Efforts at such reorientation have unfortunately been rather tardy.
Suicides
among states young people have various reasons. Numerous instances have been
reported of young girls committing suicide, mainly for reasons of inability to
cope with the pressures of studies, parental pressures for premature marriages
or unhappiness with the selected groom or even failure in love. Reports of giving up life by hanging
themselves up from the ceiling fans are quite common. These suicides are
largely because of high aspirations on one hand and on the other observance of
age-old traditions by parents who have not been able to adapt to the changing
times. The state perhaps could think of intervening by way of making efforts to
raise educational levels of people who are somehow not touched by the sweep of
education and its edifying influences. The parents in such sections are not
able to tune in with the rapidly changing attitudes among younger people. A lot
is being done both, by the Centre and the state for education and health of
girls and yet there are pockets of such misery. A lot more is needed to be done
across the several age groups to induce and promote social change – changes in mindset that are likely to act as
prophylactic for forcing young women into mental distress that pushes them to take the extreme
step.
Students’
suicides have consistently been occurring among the boys and girls largely of
professional institutions. As the field of Humanities presents to them a dismal
future there is great rush to get into engineering/technological or medical or
other professional institutions in search of better prospects. After scraping
through the entrance tests, generally by hook or by crook, they find the going
tough when they are up against the courses they find difficult to tackle. The
products of the infamous “Vyapam” scandal are living examples of children in
such unfortunate vicissitudes. Unable to deal with the pressures of these courses
and facing prospects of failure at the examinations they find their and, in
many cases, their parents’ dreams shattering all around them. Suffering from
severe depression they find only death as deliverance from their misery. It is
a highly aspirational society today and everybody nurses dreams of a good job
and a reasonable income to lead a decent life in what they see a rising India.
However not everyone is equipped adequately to deal with such academic pressures.
Having taken up the courses by means fair or foul they find themselves unable
to deal with the crunch situations after entry into institutions. One hears of
a lot of counseling of students but one wonders whether there is counseling for
them at crucial stages of their educational careers to facilitate selection by
them of a stream that suits their intellectual abilities. This appears to be
more necessary for those who belong to the economically weaker sections
While
for the deaths at railway crossings the responsibility is only of those who get
hit by running trains, for accidental deaths on the roads the responsibility is
largely of traffic police and the road construction engineers. True, a large
number of deaths are caused due to over-speeding during the late hours of the
night or early morning hours but many deaths occur because of faulty road
engineering or lack of maintenance of roads. Failure of traffic police to
control the traffic or check deviation from traffic rules or even possession of
a valid driving license are also contributory to the high incidence of
casualties on the roads. A report recently said Bhopal is among the four mega
cities in so far as deaths in road accidents are concerned. Governance on the
roads needs to be strengthened, especially in view of proliferation of two
wheelers which are used largely by reckless students and those who belong to
the rising neo-middleclasses who never bother to equip themselves with the
knowledge of traffic rules.
Madhya
Pradesh is also reported to be the state where number of deaths during
pregnancies is second highest in the country. This is basically because of
institutional failure in the healthcare sector where the performance of the
state is marked by sheer poverty of effort. These avoidable deaths are largely
because of absence of doctors, medicines or ambulances in the rural and remote
areas. Apart from such unconscionable neglect in regard to maternal health the
state lags behind even in the infant mortality rate. While in the urban areas
the state seems to have abdicated from its responsibilities in healthcare, in
the rural areas its services, at best, are patchy. Though it is not a matter of
mere statistics, performance of the state is generally dragged down in
healthcare by its lack of the needed effort in rural areas.
What
emerges from the above is that mere high growth rate in Gross State Product
(GSP) cannot take care of the two vital sectors of healthcare and education and
it is these two social sectors, along with infrastructure, which extend
happiness and wellbeing to citizens. Neither a two digit growth in GSP, as is
claimed by the state, nor the establishment of a department of happiness can
prevent suicides of farmers and disappointed young people or accidental deaths
or deaths due to lack of institutional health facilities. What are needed are
focused efforts to tackle the basic issues of governance for all-round improvement
in the levels of healthcare, education and infrastructure.
*Photo from internet
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