Harsh Mander: The intertwined maladies of India’s inequality

The burning pyres that line city streets, the mass anonymous graves, the bodies floating in the Ganga, loved ones choking to death outside hospitals: it is incredible how these memories of nightmares in a loop from the pandemic have so quickly faded from public memory.

In the national elections that followed in 2024, pledges that states would do enough to protect and promote the health of every person in this vast teeming land were hardly heard. India has one of the most privatised health care systems in the world, and one of the lowest levels of public spending on health as a percentage of the total gross domestic product. The tragedy of mass deaths – according to some estimates as high as five million – has not changed this.

India lags way behind most countries in the world also in promising the right to health as a constitutionally guaranteed right. Today more than half the countries in the world contain references to the right to health. India is not one of these. What the right to health mandates is that the state acts (and also does not act) in ways that enable each individual to attain the highest possible levels of health which includes...

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