NGO Praja Foundation has released a White Paper which reveals shocking details of how BMC officials underplay the dreadful state of public health and Mumbai’s healthcare system.
NGO Praja Foundation has released a White Paper which reveals shocking details of how BMC officials underplay the dreadful state of public health and Mumbai’s healthcare system. The report titled ‘Health of Mumbai’ trains the spotlight on discrepancies between the actual number of deaths in the city due to tuberculosis (TB), malaria, dengue, cholera, even diarrhoea, and the data released to public by the civic body. Meanwhile, owing to incompetent municipal councillors raising limited or nil queries on health-related issues, much-needed policy change to improve the system does not occur.
The White Paper is an indicator of how one of the richest municipal corporations spending nearly Rs 218 crore per annum, has very little to show for all the expenditure. As part of this document — five-year data, accessed through numerous RTI applications on the basis of cause of death mentioned by BMC ward offices on death certificates of various individuals — revealed that even as patients died of worrisome but preventable diseases such as TB, cholera, dengue and malaria, data released by BMC was restricted only to BMC hospitals and dispensaries.
The RTI data revealed that since the past five years, 33,442 people had died of TB, with a total 19 fatalities daily in Mumbai, averaging 6,688 every year. Dengue cases too had gone up eight times in five years with the total number of cases standing at 15,244 presently. From 2014-15 to 2015-16, the number of Cholera cases had risen seven times with 31 in 2014-15 and 207 in 2015-16.
The White Paper revealed that different surveillance systems of the civic body, set up to monitor the spread and casualties of these diseases, had been underplaying the figures ever since. A yawning gap was found between deaths reported by disease surveillance systems on the one hand and actual death certification on the other. For instance, the public health department malaria surveillance system recorded 18 and 16 deaths due to malaria in 2014 and 2015, respectively whereas 24 ward offices mentioned the actual number of death certificates awarded as 112 and 92, respectively.
Moreover, lack of awareness among public leaders was the biggest concern. Out of 227 councillors, 36 of whom are members of the Public Health Committee, only a handful were interested in raising questions during meetings with four councillors, Pramod Sawant, Sandhya Yadav, Geeta Gawali and Tavaji Gorule not having raised a single query.
“Four MLAs (Ramesh Latke, Ram Kadam, Capt R. Tamil Selvan and Trupti Sawant) have not asked a single question in two sessions (winter 2014 and budget 2015). If elected representatives are not serious enough about the city’s health issues, how are we going to fight these problems ” asked Milind Mhaske. Project Director of Praja Foundation,
In 2015, MCGM conducted a verbal autopsy study on TB deaths. BMS chief Ajoy Mehta said, “The study seems like a half-hearted effort as no criteria was set for sampling, questionnaire and methodology. However, the report does note MCGM registered 7,090 deaths due to TB in 2014, while its TB control unit recorded only 1,351 deaths. This anomaly needs to be explained by public health department.”
Additional Municipal Commissioner, I.S. Kundan as well as executive health officer of MCGM, Padmaja Keskar, remained unavailable for comment despite repeated calls and messages.
