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In India, following the Covid-19 pandemic three years ago, it was almost impossible to forget the extent to which fitness had become a political battleground. The government has been accused of underestimating the number of deaths in the country, has used the disease as a pretext to attack members of the Tablighi Jamaat organization in Delhi and even the vaccination certificate has become an opportunity to show the personality of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
After the pandemic, it is moderated by assuming that in the next elections debates and problems of public aptitude will be the center of attention. However, despite the circular of the national elections between 2021 and 2023 and the ongoing Lok Sabha elections in India, public fitness does not seem to be a topic that is discussed in election discussions.
Although the pandemic has highlighted the serious shortcomings of public fitness infrastructure, India’s recent national budgets do not have particularly higher spending on fitness. In fact, insights and reports imply that fitness allocations in budgets as a result of Covid-19 have declined.
In the world fitness and fitness systems rankings, India ranks 112th out of 191 countries. India has one of the lowest fitness spending rates in the world, at about 2. 1% of its GDP, according to World Bank data. The National Family Health Survey-3 shows that 70 percent of families in urban spaces and 63 percent of families in rural spaces still get most of their health care from the personal sector. This makes India one of the poorest countries. -Out-of-pocket spending on fitness in the world.
Why is public health care still so ignored by India’s political parties?After Covid, no primary politician has tried to make public fitness a primary issue on the electoral agenda.
In fact, as was evident in the second wave of Covid between January and June 2021, when the infection and death rate is highest, pandemic protocols were blatantly ignored in the parliamentary elections in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal. for the postponement of the elections, nor did he mention the need for a comprehensive reform of public health as a component of the electoral platform.
One conceivable explanation is the reluctance of political parties to promise public fitness services from below, which require long-term commitment and investment, beyond the scope of a five-year electoral term. As a result, we have noticed the proliferation of government services. -Sponsored fitness insurance schemes, a desperate attempt to cover India’s insufficient fitness.
But what about the other actor: the electorate? Research indicates that the electorate also does not consider physical fitness an electoral priority. Surveys conducted through Lokniti-CSDS, a research organization that studies electoral patterns and voting habits in India, show that less than 1% electorate fitness is a vital electoral issue, a trend that continues to be more or less constant even after the pandemic.
This is consistent with the effects of our own ethnographic research, conducted in West Bengal between August 2023 and January 2024. When asked about the points that would influence their voting choice in the upcoming election, none of the respondents discussed fitness even briefly.
This is surprising, given that many of the respondents have been directly affected by the pandemic. Some of them lost their jobs or their source of income during the lockdown and are still struggling. Some of their relatives have lost, tragedies that, according to their own confessions, may have simply been avoided with increased infrastructure in public hospitals.
One explanation for this is that the Indian electorate is influenced to the maximum by the schedules set by political leaders or parties. Since fitness has never been on the electoral calendar of India’s political elites, it continues to be outside the political realm through the electorate. .
Public fitness in India is in desperate need of comprehensive reforms. This will require political will and sustained commitment. This can be achieved with sufficiently good public participation and civil society discussions on fitness as an integral component of the electoral platform over a long period of time. .
Niladri Chatterjee is a historian and researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway. Eleonor Marcussen is a history researcher in the Department of Cultural Sciences and a member of the Research Center for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden.