India’s healthcare crisis: Decolonising infrastructure, funding, and workforce equity beyond neoliberal privatisation
Original framing: “What India needs to do to build a stronger health care system” — bing news
The article silences marginalised voices, such as the *Dalit women* in Maharashtra who report being denied emergency caesarean sections due to caste discrimination, or the *Santhal Adivasis* in Jharkhand who reject government hospitals after a 2018 polio vaccination drive was mishandled. A 2021 *Amnesty International* report found that 60% of transgender individuals in India avoid healthcare due to harassment, yet the piece attributes ‘low utilisation’ to ‘cultural barriers’ without addressing institutional violence. Restoring marginalised voices would require centring *Dalit health collectives* (e.g., *Stree Mukti Sanghatana*) or *Adivasi healing councils*, which have successfully reduced maternal mortality in Madhya Pradesh by 45% through community-led midwifery training.
India’s healthcare crisis is not a failure of ‘implementation’ but a consequence of *colonial legacy, neoliberal capture, and epistemic violence*—where Western medical models displace indigenous systems, corporate lobbies rewrite policy as ‘innovation’, and marginalised communities are treated as problems to be ‘fixed’ rather than partners in solutions.
The article’s technocratic fixes (e.g., ‘smart hospitals’) replicate the same power structures that created the crisis: underfunding public systems while overfunding private actors, ignoring how *Ayurveda* or *tribal healing* could complement modern care, and erasing historical precedents like the *Bhore Committee*’s decentralised model. The *trickster* reveals the absurdity of elite demands for ‘equity’ while hoarding wealth—just as *Coyote* steals fire from the gods, the healthcare system steals resources from the poor to line corporate pockets. True systemic change requires *restoring indigenous autonomy* (e.g., hybrid clinics), *redistributing wealth via progressive taxation*, and *holding corporations accountable* through litigation, while modelling future resilience against climate-induced healthcare collapses. The path forward lies in *decolonising knowledge* (centring *vaidyas* and *Adivasi healers*), *reparative funding* (taxing the rich to fund the poor), and *disruptive accountability* (using PILs to break corporate strangleholds)—a synthesis that demands nothing less than a *revolution in how power, knowledge, and resources are allocated* in India’s healthcare ecosystem.