Added to that is the burden of cost. Cancer treatment has always tended to bes expensive for several reasons the treatment is prolonged for one , the treatment is also not available every where typically the cheapest treatment available would be in the handful of regional cancer centers run by the government and the travel itself is fraught with costs and logistical expenses.

In spite of the fact that cancer strikes all sections of society and only perhaps lung cancer is associated with a clearly defined high risk behavior , which means that not much preventive measures can be really taken, the disease suffers from neglect. Conditions like HIV and AIDS which have got vocal activist groups taking up the cause of treatment care are able to garner funds from both the government and international philanthropic donors but cancer patients are not so lucky.

Apart from the fact that the very diagnosis of this disease spells worries for a cancer patient's family, what hits even harder is the exorbitant amount of money charged by the pharma companies for the drugs that are crucial for a cancer patient's survival at an advanced stage. Till recently the fact that Indian pharmaceutical companies reverse engineered many of the drugs and made them available at comparatively cheaper prices made them some what accessible.

This climate is slowly changing. The newer and more effective drugs which a patient would reach for tom try and prolong life or alleviate symptoms are also the most expensive and the changing patent laws in India more or less make them inaccessible. To cite an example , the multi national Novartis had filed a case in the Madras High Court, challenging the clause of the Indian Patent (Amendment) Act, which does not grant patents to medicines that are new forms of an existing drug or are "ever-greened" rather than being innovations. The patents office in Chennai refused to give patents to Novartis' leukemia drug Gleevec on the grounds that it was "ever greened", in February 2006.

Till the litigation in the Chennai patent office, many well known Indian forms were manufacturing the generic product end selling it for a fraction of the multi national's own product. However with Gleevec now having gone into litigation and the patent laws changing their color in conformity with trade laws , many firms have quietly stopped producing the drug. They do not want to invest in a contentious product without the law having been settled. This means that leukemia patients , who could have befitted from the generic versions of Gleevec, now have to purchase the hugely expensive product from Novartis or go without it..... or take the potentially explosive route of purchasing he drug by selling off home and hearth and eventually becoming bankrupt- a scenario by no means uncommon in India and in situations far less prohibitive than cancer.

Even the modified and much harsher patent laws of today which protect the interests of the producer than the consumer provide for the government to suspend the laws of patent and produce drugs generically if in the instance of a public health emergency. But in spite of the fact that cancer is one of the three top causes of death in the country , the government has so far looked the other way and not acknowledged it to be so. Although HIV and AIDS has received the attention it deserves and more there are other pressing public health needs which have not received their due attention. And mean while cancer patients and their families suffer a thousand miseries in their life time facing the burden of expenses and disease that they do.

It is detestable indeed that young children are being exposed to death , destruction and violence at such a young and impressionable age and that too by groups who are supposedly the custodians of their peoples' well being and identity. Instead of creating a climate where in these children can finish their education , have a healthy childhood and then grow up be fulfilled citizens of their home land, they are being indoctrinated to kill , hate and destroy from their earlies years. The ideologues of these groups, mostly ensconced overseas , think nothing of using small children to fight their battles , all in the name of preserving supposedly unspoilt and pristine culture which the Indian state is supposedly destroying.

The consequences for society are obviously devastating. If the child soldier does survive this spell of "army service", with negligible education, skill and indoctrinated with hatred and venom, they are rendered unsuitable for any constructive role in society and they often take the deadly route of drugs, HIV & AIDS and death and the society of the North East is demonstrating enough of the evidence where large sections of youth show no evidence of hope or any thing constructive and are caught up in a spiral of drugs, pleasure and an existence devoid of hope.

According to Amnesty International, the human rights group which has tracked this phenomenon closely reports that Often recruited or abducted to join armies, many of these children - some younger than 10 years old - have witnessed or taken part in acts of unbelievable violence, often against their own families or communities. Such children are exposed to the worst dangers and the most horrible suffering, both psychological and physical. What is more, they are easily manipulated and encouraged to commit grievous acts, which they are often unable to comprehend. Many girl soldiers are expected to provide sexual services as well as to fight.

The Indian government an state has several aberrations and human rights violations are certainly part of them but it has never intentionally taken such a grotesque approach to soldiering and policing and it does try to maintain internal checks and balances to minimize violations where ever they do take place. In fact, the government is trying for long to come to some settlement with groups like the NSCN-IM and the ULFA , so that resolution of differences occurs amicably , quickly and the government has approached these talks in a spirit of maximum compromise. So do these atrocities on children , who are given no choice but are thrust into a particular way of life figure in their discussions ? One can only hope so and expect that pert of the political resolution that the government is trying so hard to achieve will mean that children get to know what it is to be a child before being exposed to the harsh world of adults !

There will always be a debate about the manner in which the government should prioritize its expenses and spends and typically the elephantine head of national security gobbles up bulk of the money leaving the social sector with some crumbs. But even assuming that the government sets aside some funds for health care along the lines of the funds collected through the education cess or the safety surcharge on railway tickets there is no way that allocation will ever keep pace with cost escalation and therefore prudence would always be necessary in the manner in which what is available is spent.

That brings me to the topic of the tummy tucks and face lifts and other such that the Army is offering for free to serving and ageing army officers and their spouses to preserve their youthful looks through the Command Hospital in Pune. No one will deny that the Armed Forces deserve the best health care that the country can provide but tummy tucks and face lifts and nose jobs at the cost of the tax payer ? Considering that the bulk of the taxes one pays bare not direct taxes like income tax but indirect taxes which are built into the necessities of daily life , it is therefore ironical that parents who had to abandon their children because they did not have the money are now contributing to the artificially constructed noses and tummies of some middle aged and obese general.

The problem of increased costs in health care is a complex one and it cannot be easily tackled. Some of the historical advantages that India had of producing cheaply produced generic drugs , we are now slowly losing as patent laws change and we give in to the dictates of Western multi nationals. Health insurance , which is what most of the developed world lives by has not really taken off in the country as with large populations living just in survival mode , coping with troubles and issues today is their concern and not the difficulties that may crop up tomorrow. So the problem of abandoned children is not going to go away any time soon. Meanwhile , we will have lots and lots of silent cradles where the cry has fallen silent and lot of obese army men with their baggy eyelids fixed, tummies trimmed and their faces and noses lifted with some help from a poor man's taxes a man who can't feed his own children and left them to the elements and the goodness of God. Some where along the way, we have lost the art of discernment. We can not distinguish any more between necessity and vanity. And that is sad.

During his long innings in parliament , he chose to contest from Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh which hasn't been as lucky as Amethi and Rae Bareli in in the people it has sent to parliament in the post Nehru era. But History has played a cruel joke on Jawaharlal Nehru — a bandana-wearing mafia don who is accused of murder has taken his place. Everything about Atiq Ahmad is quietly sinister, down to the curl of his mustache. But his fawning followers compare him with the first Prime Minister of India.

Uttar Pradesh has come a long way in its journey in democracy. The Congress Party of Panditji is a distant number four or so in the stakes for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections which are on now. What is sad or baleful about th the whole matter is not the decline of the Congress Party but the brand of "peoples' representatives" that have now taken the place of the late Prime Minister. The bigger joke on Nehru is not who represents Phulpur in parliament but what kind of person does and the state of the polity in Uttar Pradesh mired as it is between Bahu balis like Atiq or obscurantists like Yogi Adityanath , who don religious garb and practice a kind of politics that was abhorrent to the progressive , forward thinking and secular minded Nehru. Besides, today it finds itself caught in a vicious web of caste politics.

Nehru garnered support from all sections of society and irrespective of ideological affinities was respected by most as a statesman and a humanist.. Today the voting pattern is determined by caste equations: the Yadavs back the Samajwadi Party; the Brahmins support the Bharatiya Janata Party; and the Dalits go along with the Bahujan Samaj Party. And it is not that these parties are any more ideologically pure either. The Samajwadi party has lost its socialist mooring, the BSP is all things to all people as it realizes that the Bahujan vote alone is not sufficient in electoral politics and the BJP is supposedly open if necessary , to prop a SP led government , to keep the Congress out of any share in the power game. Along the way , the egalitarian society that Nehru dreamed off has fragmented as society fragments along caste lines , propped up by his own Congress led government. Nehru is passe and his ideology obsolete and no where is it more evident than his parliamentary constituency of Phulpur.

No, this is not a conscious decision by the government or any one else to take a conscious step back into the stone age. It is just a necessity born out of the severe energy crunch that has led the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra to experience unprecedented power cuts. With electricity not available for close to 18 hours in rural areas , all the modern gadgetry and technology has come to naught. Ultimately , to make things even barely functional , one had to resort to older technology which had stood the test of time in lesser times!

While India began to undergo a technological revolution in the 90s, the emphasis on adequate back office infrastructure did not unfortunately receive equal emphasis leading to a lop sided model of development which we will take years to recover from. Thus we have a robust automobile industry without adequate roads , a growing aviation industry without enough airports and runaways , a booming telecom industry without adequate spectrum and of course large scale growth of industry without commensurate increase in the ability to absorb this growth.

Since India launched economic reforms in 1991, growth has been disproportionately urban and this has created myriad stumbling blocks. on the roads , especially in rural India where potholes are ubiquitous, crashes are common and traffic is routinely brought to a standstill as dozens of trucks sit idle waiting for permission to move. Throughout the country, crowds, delays and ramshackle infrastructure are the norm. In many places outside of a handful of cities, reliable power is little more than an elusive dream. This poor infrastructure is a bottleneck that could slow down growth and has created demand-led inflationary pressures as there is no consistency of service.

India's recent expansion has been impressive. Since 2002, GDP has risen 7.5% per year or more. In 2005 and 2006, it hit 9% and 9.2% respectively. But while that is good statistics , the fact that matters of basic infrastructure like Bijli,Pani and Sarak that matter to the common man are still not dealt with is a matter of considerable concern, especially as infra structure projects have a long gestation period and problems identified today may require a decade or more to resolve and the matter may actually get more aggravated along the way.

Although the government has tried to do its bit in encouraging core investment and facilitation in the infrastructure area , the major difficulty has been that there has been little synergy in the planning processes so that infrastructure development and businesses which ride on this backbone are planned in tandem. It would be a good idea to be futuristic inso far as infrastructure needs and budgeting for them is concerned as they typically can not be fast tracked to keep pace with suddenly generated demand. Till that is done and we have holistic and synergistic planning , we will continue to be using type writers even as computers and other gadgets sit idle in the absence of electricity to power them.