Harsh Mander: What life taught me about health, inequality and kindness

The government may continue to be in denial. But two facts are incontrovertible.

First, that India lost in the Covid pandemic more people than any other country in the world. And second – even more tragically and culpably – that had India put in place a robust system of public healthcare, a vast number of these lives could have been saved.

In the shadow of this mega-tragedy of many million preventable Covid deaths, I reflect a lot about what governments around the world have done, and not done, and must do, to assure health care reaches, with dignity, people who are in greatest need of care.

This thinking is informed in small part by my own learnings around public health gathered in my life’s journey, some of which I share here. I do so in humility, not because my insights are remarkable, but because of what I learned about the enormous public culpability of India’s inequalities. I bore witness to its colossal costs in human suffering. I write also because of my recurring epiphany of how justice and kindness are so closely intertwined.

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