‘Staying Alive’: A doctor’s well-researched, authoritative critique of India’s public health system
· Scroll
Ramani Atkuri’s new book, Staying Alive: Dispatches from the Margins, is part memoir and part authoritative critique of India’s health system. Atkuri, a public health doctor, has worked in Central India for almost four decades. She grew up in Bokaro, Bihar (now Jharkhand) and trained as a community health physician at Christian Medical College, Vellore.
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Since the early 1990s, she has worked as a health care provider, trainer, and health systems researcher-evaluator in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan, and remote parts of many other states. Drawing on meticulously documented diaries, unpublished reports, conversations with colleagues, and extensively published research, she presents a rich social perspective on India’s public health system.
The book’s central aim is to expose the health inequities that Atkuri has witnessed in her long career. She describes the morbidities and the tragedies of preventable deaths resulting from structural determinants in remote regions. She contrasts the sophisticated care available to medical tourists and the country’s elite in metropolitan cities with the absence of basic primary health care for most of India’s population. Her account conveys the magnitude of the health crises facing people in far-flung, remote corners of the country.
Personal experience
The book has 12 chapters in addition to the introduction, notes, and references. The introduction...