Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
ASIA / PACIFIC
August 2, 2021
Pandemic leaves Indians mired
in massive medical debts
By Krutika Pathi and Yirmiyan Arthur
The Associated Press
EW DELHI — As coronavirus
cases ravaged India this spring,
Anil Sharma visited his 24-year-
old son Saurav at a private hospital in
northwest New Delhi every day for more
than two months. In May, as India’s new
COVID-19 cases broke global records to
reach 400,000 a day, Saurav was put on a
ventilator.
The sight of the tube running into
Saurav’s throat is seared in Sharma’s
mind. “I had to stay strong when I was with
him, but immediately after, I would break
down as soon as I left the room,” he said.
Saurav is home now, still weak and
recovering. But the family’s joy is
tempered by a mountain of debt that piled
up while he was sick.
Life has been tentatively returning to
normal in India as new coronavirus cases
have fallen. But millions are embroiled in
a nightmare of huge piles of medical bills.
Most Indians don’t have health insurance
and costs for COVID-19 treatment have
them drowning in debt.
Sharma exhausted his savings on pay-
ing for an ambulance, tests, medicine, and
an ICU bed. Then he took out bank loans.
As the costs mounted, he borrowed from
friends and relatives. Then, he turned to
strangers, pleading online for help on
Ketto, an Indian crowdfunding website.
Overall, Sharma says he has paid more
than $50,000 in medical bills.
The crowdfunding provided $28,000, but
another $26,000 is borrowed money he
needs to repay, a kind of debt he has never
faced before.
“He was struggling for his life and we
were struggling to provide him an
opportunity to survive,” he said, his voice
thick with emotion. “I was a proud father
— and now I have become a beggar.”
The pandemic has devastated India’s
economy, bringing financial calamity to
millions at the mercy of its chronically
underfunded and fragmented healthcare
system. Experts say such costs are bound
to hinder an economic recovery.
“What we have is a patchwork quilt of
incomplete public insurance and a poor
public health system. The pandemic has
shown just how creaky and unsustainable
these two things are,” said Vivek Dehejia,
an economist who has studied public policy
in India.
Even before the pandemic, healthcare
N
ONLINE OBSTACLES. Sri Lankan students attend their online classes from a treehouse (top photo) on a
mountain in a reserve forest in Lunugala, Sri Lanka, and while sitting on tree branches (bottom photo) in the vil-
lage of Bibila, Sri Lanka. Climbing rocks and sitting on tree tops is not part of their curriculum, but children in vil-
lages surrounding the capital city are doing just that to be able to catch mobile signals to access online classes.
The digital divide fuelled by uneven internet access and high data cost has forced many students out of the for-
mal education system in Sri Lanka. (AP Photos/Eranga Jayawardena)
In Sri Lanka, a dangerous
climb for online school
By Eranga Jayawardena
The Associated Press
OHITIYAWA, Sri Lanka —
Getting online school lessons for
residents of a remote Sri Lankan
village requires a trek through dense
bushes sometimes visited by leopards and
elephants.
The
teachers
and
about
45
schoolchildren in Bohitiwaya then climb
more than 2 miles to the top of a rock to
find an internet signal.
Information technology teacher Nimali
Anuruddhika uses the signal to upload
lessons for her students who haven’t been
able to go to school because of the
COVID-19 pandemic. The students who
also live in the village make the same
climb to download online lessons sent to
them by their teachers.
Not all have mobile devices or laptops,
with four or five children sharing one
device.
Their parents, most of whom are
farmers, often accompany their children.
H.M. Pathmini Kumari, who accompanies
his sixth-grade son, said the children climb
the rock twice a day and their safety is a
big concern for parents.
The village in the central-eastern part of
the island country lacks basic amenities,
and its children had been studying in a
government school, now closed, that is
B
about 10 miles away.
In the village of Lunugala, about 37
miles away, adults escort schoolchildren to
a mountaintop treehouse in a forest
reserve. It’s about 30 feet high and has
internet access. They take turns uploading
their homework and downloading lesson
plans.
Schools in Sri Lanka have been closed
for the most part since March 2020.
Authorities say they make every effort
to provide all children access to education,
but Joseph Stalin, who heads the Ceylon
Teachers’ Union, says at most 40% of the
country’s 4.3 million students can
participate in online classes. The majority
lack access to devices or connectivity.
Sri Lanka’s government has also begun
a campaign to vaccinate all teachers with a
view to reopening schools soon.
CRIPPLING DEBT. Anil Sharma shows a photo-
graph of his son Saurav, who was being treated for
COVID-19 at a private hospital in New Delhi, India, on
July 1, 2021. Life is tentatively returning to normal in
India as coronavirus cases fall. But millions are em-
broiled in a nightmare of huge piles of medical bills.
Most Indians don’t have health insurance and costs
for COVID-19 treatment have them drowning in debt.
“I was a proud father — and now I have become a
beggar,” says Sharma. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)
access in India was a problem.
Indians pay about 63% of their medical
expenses out-of-pocket. That’s typical of
many poor countries with inadequate
government services. Data on global
personal medical costs from the pandemic
are hard to come by, but in India and many
other countries treatment for COVID is a
huge added burden at a time when
hundreds of millions of jobs have vanished.
In India, many jobs returned as cities
opened up after a severe lockdown in
March 2020, but economists worry about
the loss of some 12 million salaried
positions. Sharma’s job as a marketing
professional was one of them.
When he asked his son’s friends to set up
the campaign on Ketto to raise funds,
Sharma hadn’t seen a paycheck in 18
months. Between April and June this year,
40% of the 4,500 COVID-19 campaigns on
the site were for hospitalization costs, the
company said.
The pandemic has driven 32 million
Indians out of the middle class, defined as
those earning $10 to $20 a day, according
to a Pew Research Center study published
in March. It estimated the crisis has
increased the number of India’s poor —
those with incomes of $2 or less a day — by
75 million.
“If you’re looking at what pushes people
into debt or poverty, the top two sources
Continued on page 5
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