By Kabir Sheikh
A contract health worker is posted in a remote health post, 700 km away from where his spouse and children live. He sees them once a year, using up most of his annual leave of 18 days, in travel. He has been applying unsuccessfully to be posted closer to them for the past 16 years.
A newly posted, energetic health administrator, refuses to cooperate with the local collusive networks that embezzle and misuse funds. She is transferred to another district even as she is gradually taking measures to improve the implementation of various government schemes. The old ways of corruption and inefficiency are quickly re-established.
A pregnant woman walks all day to a health post, to find that there are no health workers qualified to manage her routine delivery. The one staff nurse employed in the health post had left service recently, because she had not received a long-due promotion. The woman dies in childbirth of avoidable causes.
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