Photo above: In surgery at Delhi’s private Apollo Hospital. New Delhi, India. © Tom Pietrasik 2007

Exactly six months ago I spent my first night ever in a hospital after contracting dengue fever. The experience was not at all pleasant but I was lucky enough to be insured and was admitted to a room in one of Delhi’s premier private hospitals. For ordinary Indians, the kind of care I received is simply unheard of. Two distinct worlds exist side by side when it comes to healthcare in this country. The vast majority must make do with an under resourced and oversubscribed public service while a tiny and wealthy minority benefit from kind of top-grade care I received.

The sorry state of India’s public hospitals was confirmed to me last week when I visited several public health centres in Madhya Pradesh. In the process of photographing a story on maternal health (see two photos above) I discovered that the Kolaras community health centre, 25km from Shivpuri town, had been without phenol to clean the floors for 45 days. And in Shivpuri District Hospital, women and babies who should have been in the labour ward were sleeping in a filthy corridor next to some very smelly toilets. When on my final morning in Shivpuri hospital I noticed that all the beds had clean sheets on them, it should have come as no surprise that the district collector was scheduled to make a visit later that day.

In 2004 the Congress-led government committed itself to spending 3 percent of GDP on public healthcare. Five years later they have achieved a miserly 1.1 percent. An Oxfam-supported campaign called Wada Na Todo Abhiyan is holding the government to account and fighting the injustice in India’s healthcare. This is a campaign that deserves all the support it can get.