In the run-up to the celebrations of the 75th year of Independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi set a unique target for the Home Ministry – destroy 75,000 kgs of drugs in 60 days! As with many aspects of this government, the ministry exceeded this target and burnt 1,60,000 kgs of drugs in that 60-day window!
Speaking on this topic in the Lok Sabha, Home Minister Amit Shah laid out in detail the policy of the Modi government in dealing with the drug menace and provided statistics on how 62,60,000 kgs of drugs were destroyed in the 2014-2022 period (2023 saw another 10,00,000 kgs of drugs destroyed). Now, can you imagine all the serious health problems that have been prevented because of this seizure and destruction of the drugs? The drugs are valued at nearly 1 lakh crore rupees, so can you imagine the scale of the burden that was never put on the youth of this country because of this nearly 200% increase in seizures (compared to the UPA)?
While we are on the topic of prevention, I recollect the jabs the elite crowd used to make (or still make) on the Ayurvedic way of life that the AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy) ministry propagates, again often forgetting that it is very difficult to quantify what is prevented because of following this lifestyle. When Yoga is picked up by the entire world, it is not because it is a fashion to do so, but because Yoga prevents many a health problem (physical and mental) that cannot be quantified!
We cannot speak of prevention and not bring up the topic of vaccines, especially the COVID-19 vaccines. Developing and deploying our own COVID vaccines, especially Covishield and Covaxin, is perhaps one of our biggest success stories in history. India conducted the world’s largest and fastest vaccination drive (200 crore doses in 18 months) and more importantly, everything was digital! The development and deployment of the CoWIN app was sought after by other countries too. We had discussed in detail, back then, how India mastered this process despite one of the most uncooperative opposition parties and the media.
This, ofcourse, doesn’t mean people will not get sick. Often, people living in towns and villages or even in tier-2 cities had to travel very far to get treatment for their health problems. The proximity to a good healthcare facility gets resolved if we have more medical colleges (and therefore hospitals) and more qualified doctors graduate every year. Up until the year 2014, we had only 387 medical colleges in the entire country. Today, that number is at 706 – out of which 157 of them are government colleges/hospitals. The medical seats under MBBS increased from a mere 50,000 in 2014 to more than 1 lakh in 2023! This means that crores of people now can go to a good hospital closer to their homes than spending a lot of time and money to travel to larger cities.
The Madhya Pradesh government even started to impart MBBS in Hindi. I am sure that very soon MBBS will be imparted in many regional languages too. Controversial editor Shekhar Gupta published an article in The Print in which the author thundered on and on about how medical education must remain elitist and be imparted in English only. This one article is enough to tell you how the elite are worried about losing out their bastions, one by one! Anyways, we digress.
While visiting these hospitals, crores of people in our country do not have to spend money if they are eligible for the Ayushman Bharat health cards. So far, nearly 30 crore people have been given the Ayushman Bharat cards which make them eligible to get free treatment for up to 5 lakhs rupees. So far, Ayushman Bharat has successfully catered to 6.2 crore hospital admissions worth more than Rs. 79,157 crores! Let the number sink in – 6.2 crore hospital admissions worth nearly 80,000 crores!
Even the medication you will have to take post this hospitalization has been made really affordable through the generic Jan Aushadi stores. Though these stores existed before 2014 too, their number was too small and the probability is very high that you did not even know these existed. Today, we have a whopping 10,000 such stores across India.
Through the program Heal in India, India even increased focus on what is termed as Medical Tourism – inviting foreigners to come to India to make best use of the very affordable medical facilities in India, as compared to many Western countries. This has already brought in billions of dollars of revenue to lakhs of people reliant on the medical industry in India.
Now, think about everything we just wrote. The equal focus on prevention (drug busts, AYUSH ministry, Yoga, Vaccines, POSHAN abhiyans) and on cure (more than 100% increase in number of medical colleges and doctors; more AIIMS across the country; free treatment upto 5 lakh rupees; affordable medicines closer to your home) has benefitted crores of families in our country. This brings us to our core argument – many of these beneficiaries will willing go to the polling booth and press the Lotus button on the EVM, come election day. While the opposition will be busy screaming that the EVM was hacked, the Prime Minister skilfully shows us how he hacks them!
In the first two articles of the series “Decoding how PM Modi Hacks EVMs” we were speaking about how he was creating wealth through entrepreneurship and employment. In this third article of the series, we discussed about how he created wealth through health and therefore found another way to hack EVMs!
