Healthcare for the people of India, particularly the poor people, is in a terrible state.
The government hospitals are in a terrible state. Even a premier medical institute like the All India Institute for Medical Sciences, New Delhi, looks like a railway platform, with hundreds of people waiting for several hours to be attended to.
As regards private clinics, they are simply too expensive and beyond the reach of poor people.
So what do poor sick people do ? They go to quacks. Quack doctors in almost every town are perhaps 5-10 times the number of qualified doctors.
In a case I had before me in Allahabad High Court I found that in some towns in U.P. whole clinics have been set up by quacks or people having fake medical degrees.
The Primary Health Centres in the rural areas( at least in U.P. about which I am familiar as I am from there ) are meant to be attended by state government doctors, but the reality is that most of the government doctors of the Provincial Medical Service who are posted there come there only for a couple of hours once or twice a week, and the rest of the time they are secretly running their private clinics in the cities.
Many medicines are prohibitively expensive for the poor people. So what do the poor people do ? Some go to quacks, and some go to their death.
