Imkong Walling
Back in March 2020, when much of the world was buffering up against a new and infectious global health threat, this editorial space carried a piece commenting on the health apparatus prevailing in India’s north-eastern state of Nagaland.
That piece focused on how ill-equipped Nagaland’s health infrastructure was even as the state government posed a confident front highlighting with pride the preventive measures it took.
The first COVID-19 wave came. It hit hard, the hospitals barely managing to scrape past unbroken but with human casualty and hundreds of overworked medical personnel.
It was presumably an acid test for the state health infrastructure, which stood strong despite critics calling out government neglect.
Complacency set in even as a deadlier second wave became imminent. There was no sense of urgency to ramp up the government hospitals with the requisite medical equipments and workforce. No lesson was learnt.
The second wave came but it still took more time than expected for the government to react, and worse, it under-estimated the extent of contagion and the stress on the available medical infrastructure.
The same number of overworked workforce, albeit with a few additions, and the same lot of buckling hospitals took the initial barrage. It was by all measures, way beyond sustainable and the consequences have been apparent to all.
The government had to eventually react, not surprisingly turning to Delhi with the begging bowl, writing to the Confederation of Indian Industry for aid and following up with containment measures, but ignominiously bungling the first announcement vis-à-vis nomenclature and making the press the fall guy. It was in essence a lockdown with a lesser degree of restrictions.
The announcement gaffe aside, Delhi came to the rescue again. Undreamt of by the majority of the population here up till a few months ago, in-house piped oxygen in the government hospitals became a reality.
Once a facility that only the biggest hospitals in India could boast of, a far-flung Nagaland can, hereafter, take pride in. Only that the extraordinarily rapid transition to piped oxygen in the same old rickety hospital structures with the bare minimum health equipments and service delivery feels surreal; akin to a hypothetical scenario, wherein, early humans bypassed the bronze age to get from the stone age to the iron age.
It further ignites a renewed interest to grapple with the thought of how it must have been like for the earliest Nagas leapfrogging from nature-worship to Christianity to modern education skipping the developmental transition in between.
What’s happened has happened. There is no reversing it. But it can be stated for a fact that it took 58 years and two back to back rounds of beating by a pandemic for the state government to take note of health and hospitals.
The semblance of reassurance is also not without apprehension, given which, it is hoped the government would seriously take lesson from the experience.
The writer is a Principal Correspondent at The Morung Express. Comments can be sent to imkongwalls@gmail.com
