Healthcare Problems for Rural Regions in India

Rural India, home to 65% of the population, is ravaged and devastated by COVID-19 like no other region. At first, they were safe from the first wave, as it mainly concentrated in urban areas in India. However, those people began fleeing to rural areas, bringing the virus with them.

If a person in a rural area were to contract COVID-19, there is a high chance that there was no nearby hospital for them. 31% of rural Indians have to travel over 30km to get to these hospitals. Even when they do arrive, some do not even have doctors present or drugs available to administer, leaving it to any relatives of patients to buy drugs while the hospital calls a doctor, and even if all of this happens, the patient may die before the doctor even arrives.

The first issue for healthcare in India is the sheer distance that a person must travel to reach a hospital. Today, rural India requires over 9.8k health facilities for its people. People have to travel unreasonable distances just to get treated. If they do reach a hospital, they may not provide much help.

Doctors are an essential part of healthcare and without them, their people are helpless. Unfortunately, this is the case for thousands of Indians in rural regions. There are vacancies for 3,880 doctors and a shortage of over 12.3k doctors, which is a 64% shortage of doctors. However, doctors are still useless without their equipment and drugs to use.

Doctors are well aware of the dangers the COVID-19 poses. Due to this, most want protection from the virus as they treat their patient. Doctors in areas like Gopalganj are not provided with necessary protective equipment and are vulnerable to COVID-19. They fear infection and due to this, they can not focus on providing healthcare to the best of their ability and want minimal contact with their patients.

Another issue is the lack of facilities and materials the doctors of hospitals have to work with along with the lack of proper training. One example of this is Bihar receiving ventilators to use. However, Bihar could not use the ventilators as it lacked professionals who were trained to use ventilators. Hospitals are also being overfilled and are often over maximum capacity. These hospitals do not have enough beds to provide to patients must treat them in any area available(such as the ground, bathroom, and outside). In India, only 32% of beds in government hospitals are in rural India. Even further, for every 10k people in rural areas, they have only three beds to share among themselves, showing how unprepared rural India was for a pandemic.

In rural India, thousands and thousands of people are dying. Although urban areas have a higher amount of cases, rural areas have more deaths. There are two central causes for this. One is that rural India’s health surveillance is poor. This leads to their inability to accurately track the number of cases. Due to this, the number of cases and deaths that rural India has been far more than the recorded number. With more funding, rural India may have a better chance of enduring and eventually overcoming Covid-19. For now, rural India lies helpless as it is attacked helplessly by the disease.

COVID-19 Crisis in India and its Transformation of Indian Society

COVID-19 in places of lower wealth have especially turned worlds upside down in education, working, and general communication between others. Where online communication may not have been popular or utilized at all, it is now required because of the country’s restrictions. Especially in more rural areas of India, implementation of online schooling and other measures to prevent the spread while still having a sense of community is pivotal.

As of now, there have been approximately 28.8 million cases, with about 347,000 deaths coming from the COVID-19 virus. In February of this year, a second wave of transmission was expected to be passed over, with the worst of the pandemic being at the beginning. Unfortunately, in April, hospital beds, ventilators, oxygen masks, medicine, and vaccines are scarce, causing the number of people infected to increase exponentially.

Luckily, the number of cases looks to be going down substantially, but is hard to tell if another spike will occur. Experts believe that the lower class groups were hit harder by the first wave, and now that wealthier citizens are starting to slowly go back to normal socialization, and mostly do not have any immunization, are being hard hit.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was harshly criticized for holding political rallies and festivals for Hindu pilgrims, as well as lifting many restrictions. More locally in states or cities, lockdown restrictions including curfews, limiting non-essential travel, and making vaccines both available to anyone over age 18 as well as more accessible is greatly helping.

According to a survey in 2019, 24% of families in India had access to the internet, causing many areas to not offer online schooling for children. If the government wants to make online education widespread, for a majority of students to utilize, more money needs to be put towards a better internet service and raise spending on education to more than the 3 percent of GDP it is right now.

Secondary education like universities are being halted despite the National Education Policy pushing for higher education for young adults. Some fear that because of the pandemic, it will take far too long to come back to normal, drastically affecting the percentage of the population that has any higher education.

On the bright side, those students that have been able to work through the harsh conditions the pandemic brought have taught resilience, teamwork, and a more global connection to other nations to create a better learning environment for themselves. Programs from all around the world are open to students in India varying in subjects in order to compensate for the lack of education, enabling students to take initiative and work with students and teachers from other countries to learn.

Ultimately, if India is trying to return to a normal sense of education for society, efforts from local and national governments, as well as students’ urges to gain knowledge will help bolster the best result. Providing better access to the internet, relations with other nations offering programs to Indian students, or even reopening of schools in a safe way when the surge in cases goes down will all foster better education for all.

Technological Barriers For Kashmiri Education

The northwestern region of India, Kashmir, is a mountainous and highly disputed area between Pakistan and India. After its occupation from the Mughal Empire in 1589 AD, Kashmir has been ruled by many, but currently, Indian and Pakistani states rule over it. Kashmir has had a rough history throughout its lifetime, however, they now face another impactful and more modern issue; the implications that restrictions and technological barriers have on its students.

The Kashmiri government's censorship and restriction of its citizen's social media and the internet have become a massive problem that has yet to be resolved. These restrictions are mainly caused by India and Pakistan's quarreling as the Indian government wanted to prevent false information from being shared en masse.

As claimed by the Software Freedom Law Center, Kashmir's internet has been cut approximately 31 times in the span of 4 years from 2012 to 2016. The virus SARS-CoV-2, otherwise known as COVID-19 has only been adding fuel to the fire. In early 2020, cases of COVID-19 were being rumored and talked about across social media and were quickly shut down by authorities which inevitably prevented citizens from getting information and safety advice online.

Many countries around the world use 4G and even 5G connections which allow people to use the internet quickly and efficiently, however, Kashmir citizens usually only had access to 2G internet up until 2019 when the Jammu and Kashmir lockdown was lifted and gave access to 3G and 4G internet. Even with this upgrade, Kashmiri citizens still suffered from not knowing when their internet would shut down.

Online education has been incredibly useful and necessary in many parts of the world and easily accessible internet is high in demand, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The limitations of the internet have crippled Kashmir much more now than ever before. Students have not received adequate education because of these internet shutdowns that are just a temporary fix to the issues the government is trying to patch.

Kashmir is being entrapped by this lack of communication and lack of access to WIFI which could have dire repercussions down the line for its students. The social media ban in April 2017 shut down all internet for about 5 months straight which caused students to riot and protest by throwing rocks, chanting slogans, and marching down the streets. The mental stability of students is dropping sharply as more and more students are not able to contact their loved ones in their dorms from the internet bans.

The internet ban is not just affecting students directly, but indirectly as well. The restrictions are causing violent protests to ensue and many female students are harassed in public which causes families to be scared of sending their kids to school. Due to this, Kashmir has one of the lowest female literacy rates in India.

Kashmir's situation seems irreparable and does not look to be getting much better as high-speed, and low-cost internet is still a problem to this day. Unless action is taken now, Kashmir's education will take a big hit and its students will suffer the consequences.