{"id":934,"date":"2021-08-26T06:21:48","date_gmt":"2021-08-26T06:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/?p=934"},"modified":"2021-08-26T06:22:10","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T06:22:10","slug":"year-2-ac-after-coronavirus-a-future-imagined-by-youth-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/year-2-ac-after-coronavirus-a-future-imagined-by-youth-16\/","title":{"rendered":"YEAR 2 AC (After Coronavirus): A Future Imagined by Youth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Eeshan Sonak<\/strong>
The National Academy of Legal Studies and Research
Hyderabad
Telangana<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weekly Winner<\/strong>
(Pan India Online Essay Contest 2021- 3rd Edition)
Category \u2013 Youth<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Essay Topic:<\/strong>
The pandemic has highlighted the service gaps with respect to communities in rural areas, urban slums, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and other backward classes. How can we create more equitable health systems in which we do not leave out the most vulnerable sections of society?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Justice Albie Sacha, the legendary South African Jurist, while hearing the Soobramoney case, was faced with a moral dilemma. Mr Soobramoney, a patient suffering from chronic renal failure, approached the South African Supreme Court asking to order the state hospital\u2019s dialysis service to keep death away for as long as its machines could keep him alive. The hospital’s limited resources meant that only a few renal failure patients could be administered life-saving dialysis treatment. Mr Soobramoney did not qualify for treatment at the State\u2019s expense, as he was unlikely to recover even after treatment and only hoped to gain a few years of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading about this case and the difficult choice the Court had to make in refusing to interfere was my first introduction to the moral complexity of the enforcement of socio-economic rights. I learnt that resources are always limited. By their very nature, socio-economic rights involve rationing. Such rationing cannot be considered a restriction of the right to access services like healthcare, but the very precondition for its proper exercise. Unlike the right to free speech, which by its very nature is not rationed, the right to access health care is shared, often competitively, with other holders of the right. Therefore, socio-economic rights must have different legal characteristics from the exercise of a classical individual civil right that is autonomous and complete in itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the framing of our Constitution guaranteed first-generation civil and political rights, it has been far from successful in ensuring a progressive realization of second-generation socio-economic rights such as food, housing, health, education and welfare. The inequitable distribution of services has always been regarded as an inherited consequence of past injustice and no indications of a failure to meet current societal obligations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this essay, as a law student, I shall use the law and public policy lens to approach the inequitable distribution of healthcare services. As I see it, there are two co-related issues involved: first, the scarcity of healthcare services and resources, and second, the cornering of the few available resources by the dominant classes. In rural India, the first issue poses a, more significant problem. In contrast, in the urban metropolis, we see that the issue is not the inadequacy of facilities but their skewed distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addressing the first issue, I would draw a parallel to the environment I am most comfortable with- the law school setting. Like most law students in the top tier, National Law Universities seek corporate placements, many of the most gifted medical students seek jobs at high paying private hospitals in urban areas or even abroad. Apart from the existing policies; there should be measures that incentivize a civic sense of community service and social impact. I believe that this model would better tackle the crisis of inadequacy of medical services in rural India. However, understandably, the issue of capacity building in the healthcare sector is a mammoth task that must be progressively achieved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is less spoken of and equally destructive is the second issue- the cornering of existing services by a few. In the realm of health, no individual can be faulted for using their resources to gain the best possible treatment or care. I think the burden of addressing this concern rests on those formulating healthcare policy. Private hospitals often enjoy far greater infrastructural facilities and other resources vis-\u00e0-vis government hospitals. Apart from strengthening Government hospitals to bridge this wide gap, we could have a policy mandatorily requiring private hospitals to play a more significant part in the cost-free treatment of vulnerable sections of society. In sum, I see instilling a civic sense in the populace and introducing policies as the way forward in addressing the issue of our inequitable health systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eeshan SonakThe National Academy of Legal Studies and ResearchHyderabad Telangana Weekly Winner(Pan India Online Essay Contest 2021- 3rd Edition)Category \u2013 Youth Essay Topic:The pandemic has highlighted the service gaps with respect to communities in rural areas, urban slums, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and other backward classes. How can we create more equitable health systems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[262],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-contest-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/takhte.in\/VoiceofViews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}