Sterilization: Controlling population by killing?

Over a period of time, India has turned out to be a major medical tourism destination for relatively low cost operations, and its private medical facilities are regarded as being amongst the best in the value-for-money genre. But on the other hand, government medical facilities time and again have portrayed the whole Indian medical system in poor light and tainted its image. And botched sterilization cases being the latest in the government's long list of negative achievements in healthcare.

Recently, the Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the Health Ministry has distributed up to Rs 5.13 crore as compensation for 1,604 cases of botched sterilisations. India has registered a total of 2,609 cases of failed sterilisation operations so far in 2012 in which 56 people have lost their lives and some 29 people have reported serious complications. However, this is not a new phenomenon; 7,751 such botched cases were recorded in the year 2010, a figure which increased by 19 per cent and went up to 9,188 cases in 2011. This year, Rajasthan has recorded the maximum number of such cases at 772 followed by Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, while Tamil Nadu topped the list with highest number of deaths followed by Andhra Pradesh and MP.

Such alarming rise in the number of botched sterilisation cases shows how criminally negligent is the government's stand in all this. A sterilisation operation is not a super specialised operation like a heart, kidney or brain operation; rather, as much as one can understand, it is a very simple operation which can be executed with a 100 per cent success rate. Sadly, the lack of adequate care while performing such operations – from the doctors and medical staffs – combined with the lack of commitment from the government towards ensuring a zero tolerance policy, have ensured that today, getting yourself sterilized is a life-threatening act in itself. For the government, it's an easy escape by spending a measly sum of five odd crore rupees annually in compensation. The norms and terms in the rule of law with regards to compensation stipulate Rs 2 lakh for death following sterilisation in the hospital or within seven days of discharge; Rs 50,000 for death following sterilisation within eight to 30 days of discharge; Rs 30,000 for failed sterilisation and Rs 25,000 for any complication within 60 days of discharge. “They [the government medical staff] treat them [the patients] not as human beings, but as cattle or goats,” Human Rights Law Network activist Devika Biswas told the National Catholic Register after filing a petition about the matter with the Supreme Court. And the wonder of it is that there are considerable grants from US and UK agencies funding the sterilization drives in India.

Shamefully, the government neither acts towards convicting the doctors and medical staff involved in the botched operations, nor does it have a target of reducing such botched operations. It took a Bill Gates to teach India that one could reach a stage where there are zero polio infections in India. Why can't the government match the commitment of Gates in reducing sterilization accidents to nil?