When Gandhiji was asked as to what is the greatest problem of this country, he said “the callousness of the intellectuals in this country is our curse”. Any country that neglects the healthcare and education of the people is bound to stagnate and go down the drain

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”—Plato

Dear Chief Minister,

Congratulations on you’re becoming the chief minister of the most populous state of India. May God bless you with good health and enthusiasm to do good to your people. In fact, the latest definition of health is “enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate.” I know you have the enthusiasm to work, which you have demonstrated in your hard work to bring your party from the dumps back to power with clear majority to rule on your own without any coalition partner pulling the rug under your feet. It is time to celebrate. With success comes responsibility, though.

Yours is one of the poorest states of India where a large chunk of children suffer from NIDS (Nutritional Immune Deficiency Syndrome) in addition to all other problems ranging from law and order to corruption at it’s worst, thanks to all the previous dispensations. Now it is time to start with a clean slate. You have no bad political baggage on your back. You are young. You are energetic. You are educated—not because you are an engineer from Mysore University and had further education at Australia. They are minor points. The major point is that I noticed during your campaigns that you demonstrated that you are a truly educated young man. Education in the true sense is to train a human being to act “justly, skillfully and magnanimously under all circumstances of peace and war”. Elections in India have become an all out war and most of the people in the field are not educated on the above sense of the word.

I was so impressed by your campaign speeches where you stressed on development and other good things for the state and not on any unethical practices associated with Indian elections. Neither did you speak ill of your opponents, a quality I greatly admire in you. Your best was your magnanimity in sparing your opponents of any vendetta. A true victor should always be magnanimous in forgiving the vanquished. Well done and well begun. Well begun is half done. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, wrote Shakespeare. How very true?  You will have your ups and owns. When you are up do not get bloated and when you are down look up to the stars in the sky even if you are in the deep ditch! If you treat triumph and disaster, the two dangerous imposters, just the same, you will have won the game; remembering at the same time that it is not winning or losing that matters but, how you have played the game that matters. Be an authentic human being and an exception to the usual run-of-the-mill Indian politician. Keep the goonda elements at an arm’s length to get back a clean image for your party cadres who are known to take the law into their own hands.

I am also proud of you that you had your basic degree from my state. I had my PG degree from the then famous University College of Medicine at KGMC. I love Lucknow so much that I keep going back often. I was feeling bad each time that I go back that old camaraderie and the culture that I had appreciated in Lucknowites has been gradually fading. Please get it back. Let us not be parochial, after all we are all one, citizens of this wonderful world. Quantum physics now tells us that we are all one energy bundle although we look different, the so called Maya or Wircklicheit as the Germans say.

Healthy nation is a wealthy nation. I have been in this business of keeping people well for well over half a century. I could give some humble suggestions to you as to how you could transform UP into a healthy state without spending tons of money, most of which goes to grease the huge machinery of corruption. You need simple few measures to get the state back on its tracks. They are:

•   Clean drinking water for every one.
•   Three square meals uncontaminated by human and/or animal excreta.
•   Sanitary facilities like toilets in every house in the villages.
•   Smokeless choolas to save village women from the deadly carbon monoxide from the smoke coming into the house.
•   Economic empowerment of village women by cottage industries e.g. pappad making, etc.
•  Every girl to be in school and/or college till at least twenty years of age to reduce the fertility rate significantly.
•  Pregnant ladies to get a nutritious mid day meal to help improve the nutrition of poor pregnant mothers to help them beget healthy babies. Mid-day meal for a child born to a malnourished mother does not help as the child’s organs are all made in the first trimester of pregnancy.
•  Employment opportunities for able-bodied men and women to rescue them from killer diseases. Most of the latter take hold of poor people who are anxious not knowing where their next meal comes from. Poverty is the mother of all illnesses, especially the killer ones! The poor suffer doubly when they are ill. They also lose their daily wage earning capacity when they are ill pushing the dependent family further into poverty!

When all the above are in place the need for expensive hospitals and drugs will come down drastically and the populace will be healthier to be more productive. Your effort must be to increase the gross domestic product (GDP), not by adding only to the coffers of the greedy industrial honchos but, adding a few more rupees to the pockets of the poor people as well. Today the poor pay for their poverty with their own lives. Please try and reverse that. This is not an impossible task if you, at your age, with all your higher education in environmental engineering, sincerely attempt to do so.

For a change give the state clean and authentic administration for the next five years. If you do that your place in politics is assured and you will be the torch bearer for a healthy change in Indian politics.

In India the governments do not do healthcare. They just stop short of illness care influenced by the rich sickness industry. The latter creates a dread of imaginary illnesses by disease mongering. They are past masters in influencing the powers-that-be to toe their line of thinking, which is nothing but the health scare system. India has a rich heritage of herbal medicines, folk medicine and many other excellent systems like Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Homeopathy, etc. We should evolve an integrated system of sickness care combing the best in these systems after duly authenticating the methods using modern scientific yardstick. This is being done now and you could get guidance in the area from the researchers. I could help you get that information.

India has the biggest load of malnourished children, a total of 67 million in all, dying at the rate of almost one thousand a week. A large proportion of them are in your state. In fact, the Indian load of malnourished children (suffering from the disease Nutritional Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is the biggest, even larger than the total load of sub-Saharan Africa of 42 million. Preventing premature deaths must be our primary goal. The measures suggested above will go a long way in achieving that goal.

You might wonder as to why I have written this open letter suo motu?  When Gandhiji was asked as to what is the greatest problem of this country his answer was very telling. He said “that the callousness of the intellectuals in this country is our curse”. Any country that neglects the healthcare and education of the people is bound to stagnate and go down the drain. This has been happening in India, especially in UP in the last several years. Time was when UP had some of the best educational institutions. In the early 1960s the Lucknow’s University Medical College (KGMC) was a premier medical institution selected even by the Rockefeller scheme for postgraduate training facilities. I did my MD medicine from KGMC and could vouch for its very high standards at that time. I keep going there for academic activities over the last several decades and am sad to see how that institution has been allowed to go down the drain systematically. The political set up is to blame basically as each power dispensation in Lucknow wanted its own men/women to head the institution which, incidentally led to true merit being the first casualty. Political interference in higher education, nay any education, is dangerous, to say the least.

It is a shame that India spends less than 2% of its GDP on education and health, much less than all the subsidies and exemptions. This will ruin this country. Good primary education will change the face of this country in addition to poverty alleviation through food, shelter (slum clearance for example) and employment generation. I am happy that you started off with laptops, this might be construed as bottom up method to improve education, but a beginning is a good sign in that area. We need to make our education value based. Indian education today does not produce healthy minds but aims to produce wealthy careers alone. Education must stress the basic tenets of education of training a human being to act “justly, skillfully and magnanimously”. As I had noted above you have been an exception and I hope you will make yourself a role model for the youth of your state. One day you might have to do it for the whole country as I see a bright future for you to head the dispensation at Delhi.

Take the help of well meaning intellectuals in your arena to help you with constructive ideas. Have a think tank. Nitish Kumar has done that with success. You could innovate on that. Take care to avoid sycophants around you. Kings in history who took the counsel of their sycophants only eventually got destroyed.

Let me close this letter with a positive note that I have full faith in you. You will be a THINKING chief minister who will have the good of his people at heart. Let me quote Queen Victoria when she had to take over the reins of ruling the then British Empire at the tender age of thirteen when her father died prematurely. She told the crowd after her coronation at the St Peter’s Cathedral: “I am young (so are you; not so young, though) I am immature, I do not know what ruling a large Empire means but, I do know one thing for certain: I know what is good for my people”. Chief minister Akhilesh Yadavji please learn to know what is good for your people. Good speed and good luck for your sincere efforts to change the face of UP.

“Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times”—Winston Churchill

Yours ever,

BM Hegde

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, Chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London. Prof Dr Hegde can be contacted at [email protected])