DECCAN INQUIRER
Weekly e news paper
Editor: Nagaraja.M.R.. Vol.02.....Issue.19................12/05/2021
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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