Dalit-Online
Weekly e news paper
Editor: Nagaraja.M.R.. Vol.17....Issue. 26...........27/06/2021
COVID care
Fundamental Right – Supreme Court of India
Terming the right to health as a fundamental right which includes
affordable treatment, the Supreme Court on Friday said it is the duty of the
state to make provisions for affordable treatment during this unprecedented
pandemic.
“It is a world war against Covid-19. Therefore, there shall be a
government-public partnership,” a bench headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan said
while adding, “It cannot be disputed that for whatever reasons the treatment
has become costlier, it is not affordable to the common people at all.”
“Even if one survives from Covid, many a time, financially and
economically he is finished. Therefore, either more provisions are to be made
by the state government and local administration or there shall be a cap on the
fees charged by private hospitals,” the bench said in its 17-page order.
The court also asked all states and Union Territories to set up
committees to conduct monthly fire safety audit of hospitals, including the
ones treating Covid patients. The court said every state must appoint a nodal
officer responsible for ensuring adherence to fire safety norms in hospitals.
Every state must act vigilantly and work
with the Centre harmoniously. It is time to rise to the occasion. Safety and
health of the citizens must be the first priority rather than any other
considerations,” the order reads.
The court also directed the authorities to conduct more testing
and to declare correct facts and figures.
“One must be transparent in number of testing and in declaring the
facts and figures of the persons who are Covid positive. Otherwise people will
be misled.”
Rights in COVID
times
Indian
government needs to urgently address healthcare shortages amid the world’s
fastest-growing Covid-19 crisis and ensure that vulnerable communities have
equitable access to treatment. The government to end curbs on free speech and
to respect human rights in its pandemic response.
Following
widespread criticism of its handling of the pandemic, with shortages in oxygen
supplies and hospital care costing lives, the Indian government ordered nearly
100 social media posts to be taken down, saying they spread fake information.
Most of the content targeted, however, had angrily criticized the government’s
response to the crisis. Uttar Pradesh state’s chief minister has denied oxygen
shortages and warned that charges would be brought under the draconian National
Security Act against anyone, including healthcare workers, spreading “rumors”
on social media to “spoil the atmosphere.”
“The Indian
government should be focusing only in its efforts on responding to people
desperately in need of help and dying for lack of medical care. Instead, what
we find is a prickly reaction to legitimate criticism of its handling of the
crisis, including by trying to censor social media.”
India’s new
Covid-19 infections broke the global record, with over 320,000 cases recorded
on April 27, 2021, plus nearly 2,800 deaths, bringing the total to more than 17
million cases since the pandemic began in 2020. The death toll is believed to
be undercounted, and crematoriums and burial grounds are overrun. Several
hospitals have called for emergency supplies as oxygen stocks fell short.
Social media in
India are flooded with calls for help from families and hospitals running low
on supplies. The authorities are scrambling to bolster a health infrastructure
that is crumbling under the rising flood of cases. Community groups have also
stepped up to support people who are struggling due to acute shortages in
medicines, oxygen, ventilators, hospital beds, ambulances, and cremation and
burial services.
A rights-respecting
response to Covid-19 should ensure that accurate and up-to-date information
about the virus, access to services, service disruptions, and other aspects of
the response to the outbreak is readily available and accessible to all. The
government’s censoring of free speech will ultimately limit effective
communication about the pandemic and undermine trust in government actions.
Healthcare
experts have criticized the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government for
failing to invest in the country’s weak health infrastructure since the
pandemic began. Although the authorities have advocated using masks and other
public health practices, they conveyed contradictory messages by claiming that
they have beaten the virus while allowing and participating in large-scale
gatherings, including election campaign rallies. The government promoted a
Hindu religious event in which millions of people participated.
Courts have
repeatedly criticized the government for its failure to adequately address the
pandemic. “You had all of last year to plan and take a decision,” said Sanjib
Banerjee, the chief justice of the Madras High Court. “If it had been done, we
would not be in this situation... We were lulled into a false sense of security
only to be hit by this tsunami of infection now.”
Under the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which India has
ratified, everyone has the right to “the highest attainable standard of
physical and mental health.” The right to health provides that governments must
take effective steps to ensure that health facilities, goods, and services are
available in sufficient quantity, accessible to everyone without
discrimination, and affordable for all, including marginalized groups.
The government
should immediately take steps to remove bottlenecks in supply chains of
essential medical goods and services, and to ensure an adequate supply of
oxygen, life-saving medicines, ventilators, and testing kits.
Because of the
domestic crisis, the Indian government has temporarily suspended exports of
vaccines produced in India. The United States is allocating to India raw
materials critical for vaccine production so that Indian manufacturers can
address the shortage of vaccines in India and elsewhere. However, the United States,
United Kingdom, European Union, Australia, and others should also end their
opposition to India and South Africa’s proposal at the World Trade
Organization’s TRIPS Council. The October 2020 proposal would temporarily waive
certain intellectual property rules on Covid-19-related vaccines, therapeutics,
and other medical products to facilitate increased manufacturing to make them
available and affordable globally.
The Indian
government has ignored calls from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights for governments to release “every person detained without
sufficient legal basis, including political prisoners, and those detained for
critical, dissenting views” to prevent the growing rates of infection
everywhere, including in closed facilities, such as prisons and detention
centers. Instead, the BJP-led government has increasingly brought politically
motivated cases against human rights defenders, journalists, peaceful
protesters, and other critics, and jailed them under draconian sedition and
counterterrorism laws, even during the pandemic.
The Indian
government should take immediate steps to release all those jailed on
politically motivated charges for peaceful dissent and consider reducing prison
populations through appropriate supervision or early release of low-risk
category of detainees. Detained individuals at high risk of suffering serious
effects from the virus, such as older people, people with disabilities or with
underlying health conditions, should also be considered for similar release.
“The Indian
government should put people above politics and ensure that everyone gets the
medical care they need. The administration has called for citizens
and international governments to help, but it cannot shirk its own
responsibility to protect each and every life.”
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