Every now and then we read reports about equipments worth crores lying unutilized in Govt. Hospitals. On the other hand there are "privatisation" zealots that constantly harp on costs of public health care and want governnment to retreat from the sphere of health care altogether.

Our politicians and their cheerleaders from the "intellectual class" lose no opportunity in reminding us of the impending greatness that is going to be thrust on our nation. An economist-lawyer informs us that we will become middle-income country by 2012. Amidst all these shameless claims and out-claims, the cause of the vast masses that do not have access to basic health care gets lost.  

If a society does not take up the responsiblility for providing basic survival needs then we need to ask whether we want to go back days when fire services and police services were available to those people who could afford to pay. 

I think we have not harnessed our technical and innovative geniuses to come up with solutions that would make our public health care processes and instituitions more transparent and responsive.

Remember the long-winding queues in front of railway counters in pre-computerisation days. The computerisation efforts would not have been effective if the general public had access to real-time status of seat availability. Once you publish information the possibility of corruption gets reduced.

I am not sure what NICs and other vendors are doing for government hospitals. Is it not time to put in place an IT application that would show the status of every equipment available in a hospital and/or maybe hospitals in near vicinity to the users. Would that not make the hospital management more careful about allowing equipments to lie around unused?

Is it not time for Central Government to start an instituition on the lines of C-DAC to develop affordable technology solutions for health care? I am sure such an instituition can leverage the local genius and come up solutions for our huge country.