(For SI blog reader Racer44)

As we’ve said time and again, everything in India is different.

Be it the notion of honor, treatment of women, matters of love, poverty, child labor or corruption, in all of these and more India is sui generis. Mostly for the worse.

Hell, even a simple English word encounter has a completely different – and murderous – meaning in India.

Wait, we forgot to tell you about India’s Hospitals, the decrepit government hospitals that is.

As anyone the least bit familiar with India’s government hospitals knows, these buildings are straight out of Josef Mengele’s grotesquerie.

A visit to these inglorious mortuaries is worse than passage through the Hades.

Patients sleeping on the floor, dogs eating newborns (no, we’re not kidding), absent doctors, insistent demands for bribes, use of expired medicines and non-functioning equipment are all par for the course in India’s government hospitals, the sole hope for the country’s poor.

* Now comes disturbing news from India that the government-run Umaid Hospital in Jodhpur in the north Indian state of Rajasthan is infecting poor children with the deadly AIDS-causing HIV virus and Hepatitis by giving them infected blood.

When the incidents first came to light last year, the Umaid Hospital authorities quickly denied their culpability and passed the buck to others. The same hospital even got a ‘clean chit’ in an official report a few months back (Source: Hindu).

Hey, what’s new. In Incredible India, the unclean invariably get a clean chit.

Recent news reports suggest that more kids who have received blood transfusion at the Umaid Hospital are testing HIV positive giving the lie to the earlier exculpatory reports.

These kids were suffering from Thalassemia, which requires frequent blood transfusion.

At least, eight children have so far tested positive for HIV. If that doesn’t make you sick, another 43 have contracted Hepatitis C.

Now, the hospital authorities argue they lack the equipment to perform a Nucleic Acid Test to detect an HIV or hepatitis infection in the blood within three days of it being contracted (Source: NDTV).

In India, testing HIV positive is often a death sentence for the poor given the almost complete absence of treatment for these victims when they develop AIDS.

Hell, India already has the fourth largest incidence of AIDS. Who gives a f*ck if a few poor children are HIV positive, right?

If you think the above callous incident is an aberration at the state of India’s government hospitals, the following piece will make your blood curdle.

* A few years back, ants ate into the eyes of a poor woman at a hospital in Kolkata.

That was no typo. ANTS, indeed.

Here’s what Pintu Chakrabarty (the son of the victim Gauri Rani Chakrabarty had to say):

“I tried to remove the ants from her eyes, but failed. Then I complained to the nursing staff present there, but they insulted me. They even said that removing the ants was not the duty of the nurses, and would only be done after the attendant comes,” Pintu Chakrabarty alleged.

The unfortunate lady died soon after but not before suffering immensely (Source: DNA).

Caught between the Scylla of awful government hospitals and the Charybdis of extortionist private hospitals, India’s poor (who number in the hundreds of million) can at best pray for a quick and merciful death should they fall ill.

Now, what’s that noise in the background.

Must be the relatives of the dead wailing Mera Bharat Mahaan.

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