Human rights violation in India

[DV RULES]

Human Rights Watch Urges India to Prevent Abuses


February 02, 2011


The New York-based rights group, Human Rights Watch, has urged India to prevent human rights abuses which it says occur during counterterrorism efforts. The report warns that such abuses could be counterproductive in the fight against terror.

Wednesday's report by Human Rights Watch focuses on the aftermath of a spate of bombings in 2008 which killed more than 150 people in the cities of New Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad.

HRW South Asia Director Meenakshi Ganguly says the pressure on police to identify the perpetrators of these terror strikes led to arbitrary arrest and human rights abuses at every stage of custody.

"We found, in this case, people were rounded up in large numbers,” Ganguly said. “They were brought to police stations. Often they were tortured or held without being brought before a magistrate and some of them have said they were coerced to confess, and eventually many have retracted their confession.”

The report says the majority of the victims were scores of Muslim men. A militant Islamic group called the Indian Mujahideen had claimed responsibility for the 2008 attacks. But the report says suspected Hindu extremists, blamed for another bomb attack, have also suffered abuse.

Ganguly warns that such abuses could undermine efforts the fight against terror by punishing innocent people, while the guilty remain free, and by undermining public faith in police investigation.

"Quite often, when the police use torture, the information they gather is false information,” she added. “So the wrong people are identified as being perpetrators of these attacks…..people in India are no longer being able to trust the investigations because quite often torture is the only method used to coerce confessions."

The report has called on Indian authorities to investigate the case of nine Muslims being held for a bomb blast in 2006 in Malegoan in Maharashtra state. Further investigations have pointed the finger at Hindu extremists.

Indian authorities, in keeping with past practice, did not comment on the report.

Ganguly says there is support among Indian authorities for preventing rights abuses, but institutional changes are not happening.

"At the highest levels when we meet with the Indian government, there is commitment to zero tolerance for human rights violations,” said Ganguly. “However, on the ground that is not translated into anything that is significant."

Security analysts say India still relies on old methods of policing designed by colonial rulers in which abuse was an institutional practice. Demands for police reforms have been made repeatedly, but successive governments have done little to initiate those reforms.



Human Rights Watch Urges India to Prevent Abuses | Asia | English

 

[Defence Expert]

are bhai kuchh human violation ki photo bhi post karo...nanhi to maza nanhi aayega...
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Ab aur kya.....Google pe search karo aur post karo.......

 

[DV RULES]

Seeing health care as a human right in India : The lancet


January 14, 2011


The conviction of doctor and human-rights activist, Binayak Sen, could have implications for India’s attempts to achieve universal health-care coverage. Patralekha Chatterjee reports.

At a time when India is working towards making access to health-care universal, a 61-year-old medical doctor, nationally and internationally acclaimed for running health clinics for poor tribal communities in remote parts of central India, is fighting a grim battle to prove he is not a threat to the country’s security.

Doctor and civil-rights activist Binayak Sen, the first Indian recipient of the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, is in jail. On Dec 24, 2010, a trial court in Raipur, capital of Chhattisgarh state in central India, sentenced Sen to life imprisonment for sedition on the charge that he carried a letter between two members of a banned left-wing extremist outfit.

The doctor vehemently denies any wrongdoing and has appealed to the High Court, which will take up the matter on Jan 24. His family and legion of supporters inside and outside India point to the many glaring loopholes in the prosecution’s evidence.

His supporters say that Sen is paying the price for his strident criticism of counter-terrorism forces in Chhattisgarh, one among several states afflicted by left-wing extremism, and because of his sustained emphasis on the nexus between health, human rights, and equity. Sen’s mission is to make people aware that health care is a right, not a favour. At a time when India’s Planning Commission has appointed a high-level expert group to develop a blueprint for meeting the human resource needs to achieve “health for all” by 2020, the Sen case has implications far beyond his plight.

“Many people ask me why a good doctor like Binayak Sen was not content with just treating patients. But ever since he was a student, Sen had a questioning mind”, Parapeedikail Zachariah, Sen’s teacher at the Christian Medical College (CMC) at Vellore in southern India, tells The Lancet. “While studying for his MD, he focused on child health. He was not content with just classroom learning. He moved around in the community to see the effects of malnutrition on children. Malnutrition served as an entry point to Sen’s activism. Later, when he worked in tribal areas, he visited homes of people he treated and saw first-hand gross starvation and their lack of access to the many things, which the government promises but which do not exist on the ground. His engagement with community public health in tribal areas led to involvement with civil rights issues. Binayak Sen became an activist-physician not only concerned with the clinical side of health-care delivery but all the other factors like ownership of natural resources, malnutrition, and so on that affect health.”

80-year-old Zachariah, a former physiology professor at CMC, is currently the managing trustee of the Binayak Sen Support Fund, which is helping Sen’s family to fight the legal battle.

Sen’s view of health care as a right is in sharp contrast to that of most medical professionals in India, says Zachariah. Until the Chhattisgarh lower court verdict, the activist-doctor was working on a project that could have a far-reaching effect on health-care education in India. Because of the findings of the report by the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (2008), Sen was appointed by CMC as a consultant to draft a curriculum model that would incorporate human rights within the ambit of health-care education. “The medical profession in the country is highly conservative. Most doctors would like to play safe. Doctors typically protest when their own interests are at stake. But in a developing country like India where inequities are deeply entrenched or in a conflict zone, thinking deeply about health care inevitably raises the sort of questions that Binayak Sen asked”, Zachariah added.

Indian political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan tells The Lancet, “If universal health coverage is not a political issue across the country, it is because historically speaking, the idea of political rights is more established in India than social rights. However, the latter has had greater currency in southern and western India, due to reformists who took up health and education as key priorities. The social movements in these parts shaped the politics in the region. In north India, a significant exception to the norm of according less importance to social rights is Himachal Pradesh. Generally speaking, because of acute poverty, and the sheer struggle for survival faced by millions of people, something like access to food gets greater political attention than access to health care in this country.”
PIIS0140673611600317.fx2 .lrg 300x199 Seeing health care as a human right in India : The lancet

In the states where improving access to health care is an important electoral issue, parties are keen to lay claim to health schemes to win votes.

In the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, the Rajiv Arogya Sri, a health insurance programme for the poor named after former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, is perceived to have contributed to the Congress victory in the last elections. The government in the state of Tamil Nadu, also in south India, has launched the Kalaignar Insurance Scheme for Life Saving Treatments, after the nickname of the state’s chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi.

“The social sector has been an important factor in Tamil Nadu politics since Independence in 1947”, Sankaran Vijaykumar, Special Secretary for Health and Family Welfare, Tamil Nadu, tells The Lancet.

Another example of politicians promoting a health scheme to mobilise support is the Yeshasvini Co-operative Farmers Health Care Scheme in another southern state, Karnataka. Any farmer who is a member of a co-operative society in Karnataka can access expensive medical procedures by becoming a member of this scheme. Conceptualised by Devi Shetty, chair of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals Group, and the man who revolutionised cardiac care in India, it was launched by former Karnataka chief minister Somanahalli Mallaiah Krishna. Krishna is Foreign Minister in the federal government today.

Himachal Pradesh is one state in northern India that is also seeking political mileage out of health interventions. Last year, on Dec 25, the birthday of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the state government that is run by his Bharatiya Janata Party, started the Atal Swasthya Seva to provide free ambulance services across the mountainous state nestled in the Himalayas.

The state’s health minister Rajeev Bindal tells The Lancet: “Health has always been a political priority of the state government and that is proved by the fact that most people prefer to go to government hospitals than private ones, as is the case in much of India.”

The minister was referring to the fact that health care has two faces in India. Although an expanding middle class has triggered a surge in the number of private hospitals, some with state of the art facilities, poorer people, especially those living in less developed parts of the country, have little or no access to minimum health facilities free of cost. Public spending on health care is less than 1% of the gross domestic product.
“Public investment in health, particularly in primary health care, needs to be much higher to achieve health targets, to reduce poverty and to raise the rate of economic growth”, noted the 2010 evaluation of India’s National Rural Health Mission by Nirupam Bajpai, Jeffrey Sachs, and Ravindra Dholakia. The report also pointed out that “the average figures for India hide a great deal of variation in the performance of different states, which are on different points along the health transition path…While Kerala, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu are much further along the health transition trajectory, the densely populated states of Orissa, West Bengal, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh are still in the early part, with the other states falling in between.”

Less than 20% of the population have any sort of health insurance and out-of-pocket health-care costs drive tens of thousands of families into debt. So the idea of using health care as a vote catcher is not far-fetched. The high-level expert group appointed by the Planning Commission, under the stewardship of K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, is working on a comprehensive strategy to ensure quality, universal reach, and access to health-care services, particularly in underserved areas. It is expected to submit its report this year.

The group has good models from other developing countries. In 2001, Thailand extended government-financed health coverage to all uninsured people with little or no cost sharing. The reforms were a big hit with poor Thais, especially in rural areas, and survived the change of government in 2006.
At the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Montreux, Switzerland, last November, Viroj Tangcharoensathien, director of International Health Policy Programme in Thailand’s ministry of public health, proclaimed that the operative principle behind the Thai health reforms was “good for the most” instead of “best for the few”. He tells The Lancet, “It was national politics that set the universal health coverage agenda in Thailand”.

India has taken many positive steps to improve the health of its people in recent years. Now, as it contemplates universal health coverage, it is worth re-emphasisising what public health advocates like Binayak Sen make clear: health interventions cannot be seen in isolation. They work best when communities are conscious of their rights and fully aware of their entitlements.



Seeing health care as a human right in India : The lancet | Free Binayak Sen Campaign

 

[Asian.Century]

Reading this thread has made me feel pity for the Indians, what a vile country they live in...disgusting place.

Where is humanity, where is world, where are human rights organisations, where in UN...what a big monster India is turning out to be.

 

[Asian.Century]