Julian Assange No Dr Devi Shetty

Dr Devi Shetty is tragically out of step with the times. If it were an even remotely fair world he would the 21^st century’s Julian Assange. But he is a man of vision and action. Not a smelly peddler of the bleeding obvious.

Establishing the Narayana Hrudyalaya Institute of Cardiac Sciences only 10 years ago, it now performs the highest number of cardiac surgeries in the world. . “One hundred years after the first heart surgery was done, only 8 percent of the world’s population can afford it. What happens to the rest?” asks Shetty.

Having practiced in Britain for years he also asked himself why an Indian equivalent of the National Health system had not been established.

Up against the conventional wisdom that India is simply too vast in size and population for a financially struggling Government to adopt such a revolutionary institution, Dr Shetty responded by becoming a disciple of the what he calls the ‘Wall-Mart Effect’.

A system of bringing down costs and prices with huge scales of economy. Allowing a corporation rather than the Government to serve the poor profitably and astoundingly effectively. A less harsh user pays concept.

His health city near Bangalore has over 1,000 beds. Performing a heart stopping 30 plus cardiac operations a day. Shetty himself has performed over 15,000 operations in his career. They have a staggering 1,000 walk-in patients a day. The sister concern in Kolkata is looking to expand to 5,000 beds!

This astronomical infrastructure is where the ‘Wal-Mart effect’ kicks in.

Dr Shetty, demands, with his enormous buying power, that manufacturers of hospital consumables supply directly from the factory not via a problematic and expensive broker. This brings down costs.

Illustrated dramatically by Dr Shetty refusing to pay for laboratory machines that cost as much as $40,000. The manufacturer has to contend with making profit from the chemicals that the machine consumes in return for leasing the machine free to the hospital.

Every evening Doctors are sent an SMS that gives a breakdown of their individual profit/loss statement. Every Doctor is responsible for their consumption and revenue. Dr Shetty tells of how even stitch thread left on the spool is not wasted. For in other Indian hospitals the patient is charged for consumables and there is a careless attitude to conserving resources.

A blood gas analyse will cost 20 cents compared to $10 dollars elsewhere. Simply because of the huge amount of outpatients that are treated. In-patient care is considerably less profitable.

Another seismic achievement of Dr Shetty’s is Yeshasvini. This is a Karnataka comprehensive health insurance scheme that has nearly 3 million members. The monthly premiums are 15 cents a month. They now sleep in peace knowing that they will not die from not having $2000 dollars.

Dr Shetty’s sublime progress was inspired by the West but now they study him. The mortality rates at Bangalore, less than 5%, are considerably lower than New York State.

We should be scratching our heads at how he can have a dedicated nurse for every ICU patient. We should be staggered that he only charges one in 6 patients for open heart surgery. We should be rabidly supporting his plan for a health city in every Indian State.

But we won’t. I pray we see an age where he will get more respect than disaffected hackers and programmers of social websites.

Is Indian Surrogacy Medical Tourism?

The surrogacy debate has been recently reignited with a Melbourne court granting full parental rights to a gay couple with a child born to a surrogate mother in India.

Medical tourism has not been all bad. Uninsurable Americans getting bypasses in Delhi’s Apollo Hospital rather than perishing on a long waiting list in New York. A triumph of Indian expertise. An enormous revenue for the country.

Does surrogacy deserve to be classed in this revolution? Should surrogacy be even legal?

Years ago while I was studying in Delhi University, my Indian guardian Dr. Nina Dey, told me with furious indignation a story from when she was conducting research in Bangladesh. An American company invited her on a jet boat ride to an almost inaccessible island in the marshes of the delta- unaware that she spoke Bengali. The company was claiming they were conducting charitable works but it was discovered they were, under questioning from Dr. Dey, in fact guinea pigs in fertility drug trials. Many of them were very seriously ill.

This left an impression on me and I am happy to let it prejudice my views on the surrogacy debate.

Indian wombs are not for sale. India is not a gynecological two-dollar shop.

I feel for infertile couples. Being an unhinged lefty I feel even more sorry for gay couples, which by the nature of the beast are inherently infertile. But they will have to max out the credit cards, fly to Kentucky and pay a Hillbilly.

India is looking to legislate an industry that by some accounts has 3000 clinics and annually earns India half a billion US dollars. This has stemmed from innumerable complications.

Starting with the technical. A German couple contracted a clinic for a child. The German Government refused citizenship nor residency for the child because that country does not allow paid surrogacy. The Indian Government simply does not recognize children born to foreign parents who have donated eggs in the IVF process. Children are caught in this limbo.

A Japanese couple divorced during the gestation period of the Indian mother. They dropped the child like a hot potato. After a protracted legal battle the child was adopted by the Japanese man’s 74-year-old grandmother.

India has decriminalized homosexual behavior but, confusingly, it is still not legal. Press pundits in India have speculated that this may disallow gay couples entering a surrogacy contract.

These are relatively inconsequential. The industry practices demonic behavior.

The Indian mother is locked up for 9 months to ‘ensure’ a healthy child. This is just wholly bloody unacceptable. Try locking up a Californian surrogate mum for 9 months in a contractual arrangement and you would have even Sarah Palin reduced to tears.

A surrogate mother has often borne many children. Her health may suffer a heavy toll from this. Allowing a system that irreversibly punishes her body for monetary gain is wrong. Allowing a system that punishes her body out of her sheer desperation is criminal.

What happens if a child is born physically or mentally challenged or just not attractive? You can’t tell me this hasn’t happened in the thousands of surrogate births a year. Do the foreigners reject the child with a satanic quality control?

What eventuates, if the Indian mother gives birth to more than one child or more than what is in the shopping cart? Is that child a surplus to requirements? Is the child killed at birth? Tragically, this could have eventuated in a stone cold business.

If the challenged or ‘surplus’ child is not killed at birth who is to look after the poor soul? The surrogate mother? Who has not been contracted to look after the child, possibly for life. The clinic? Who run a business? These hard questions raise the possibility of widespread infanticide.

The surrogate mothers are almost exclusively impoverished rural poor who are often illiterate. Whose scope of choice is minuscule compared to the relatively rich couples that pay for their child.

This hasn’t stopped a wonderfully courageous woman who has petitioned the Delhi High Court to keep her child that she refuses to surrender. How seriously will she be taken? Up against what would have to be a superiorly funded legal team and a judiciary that favor English medium types.

Masters to this repugnant slavery have to stopped. They are the children shoppers and the shopkeepers of these clinics who pay these women as little as $500 USD.

No One Killed Jessica

Watching ‘No One Killed Jessica’, the Bollywood film based on the murder of Jessica Lall by Manu Sharma, brought back memories. Manu passing his .38 police special around a drunken party in Chandigarh. Him screaming at me. I wouldn’t have been so rudely dismissive of him if I had a real understanding how truly murderous his nature was. But I did understand that he was yet another feudal prince who, even at seventeen, had a bewildering amount of power.

The film powerfully narrates the story of this battle between the incomprehensibly powerful and the rest of us. With an important theme being the tough choices ordinary citizens have to face when confronted by gangster politicians. Take the money or take a bullet. How many of us would choose the noble option and testify?

Many of the witnesses were impoverished. The chowkidhar with young children. The servant. Offered quarter of a million dollars for 10 minutes of catastrophic memory loss.

But there were another 298 witnesses! Witnesses to Jessica Lall being shot point blank in the head in a crowded nightclub. A great deal of whom would have got along with Manu swimmingly.

I would imagine nephews and brothers in laws of Ministers and industrialists. Mahindras killing themselves to look like Mercedes. Surrounded by fixers, wearing gold chains that Houdini wouldn’t have freed himself from. Throwing back single malt Scotch Patialas between 10 percent deals, shouted above blaring bhangra.

But they are not the real villains of the piece. They have a steel strong sense of self. These social climbers never have and never will lay claim to a smidgen of ethics. They wouldn’t recognize a moral dilemma if it walked up to them and presented photo identification.

Are the real villains Delhi’s high society that ran the club and made up a great deal of the patrons? Highly educated. Highly wealthy. Highly confused.

It also seems the class has an inherent disease. For the vast majority effectively claimed to be legally blind and deaf when interrogated by police. It must be hard running India when you have so little control over your faculties.

They are hugely reliant on the grace of politicians. Manu’s father Venod Sharma, not only is reportedly a billionaire but also was a senior Congress politician. Running a business in India with the Government lobbied against you is fiscal suicide.

Is this an excuse to deny justice for the sister of a woman slaughtered for not serving a drink?

But again how many of us would testify? If I stepped out for a walk in Gurgaon and found myself facing a country pistol I might very well be persuaded to do just about anything. Giving false testimony is less painful than having a Jat goonda use you head for soccer practice.

For ‘No One Killed Jessica’ could well paraphrase the tragedy of contemporary politics. No one is to blame.

Heavenly, the film tells a history that proves me a jaded man. English medium types rose up in a glorious roar. They demanded justice in what is now a proud milestone of modern India.

Manu killed Jessica.