Rohit Shishodia

Sleeping on an empty stomach can give rise to various health problems in a fit person, but what it may result in a person who is a cancer patient and undergoing treatment, one can only imagine.

This is exactly what happened in Mumbai, where Cancer patients receiving treatment at the Tata Memorial Hospital and their attendants are living on footpaths in temporary shelters outside the hospital.

People who live in these shelters are facing a lot of difficulties in their lives as they struggle to get a room in the hospital due to a lack of funds.

While talking to the media, a patient from Madhya Pradesh’s Gwalior said that if people wouldn’t have given him the food to eat then he would have to sleep empty stomach.

“People give us food to eat; else I have to sleep without food. I have been here for eight months and have been living in this plastic shelter for two months. We do not have money. We keep tissues and sanitizers to keep us safe from Covid-19. I used to run a mill. Rs. 1.5 lakhs have been spent on treatment so far,” the patient from Gwalior, Jitendra said.

There are several shelters on footpaths outside the aforementioned hospital where the cancer patients and their attendants are forced to stay night and day due to the shortage of beds in the hospital.

The ongoing monsoon season, for which the financial capital of India is known worldwide, adds fuel to fire, not just because of the water logging in the city, but the non-availability of food during the rainy season may further worsen their health.

This isn’t for the first time that India is witnessing patients lying on footpaths, one can find hundreds of ailing patients sleeping on pavements outside the biggest and the most reputed hospital in the country—Delhi AIIMS.

Patients living on the footpaths come from rural areas of different states, mainly the areas that lack healthcare facilities forcing them to travel even just for OPD consultation.

Like Mumbai, the patients living on the footpaths in the national capital also depend on donors for food that is provided to them at noon and donors are usually the people working in NGOs.

The resolution for all of it is creating healthcare facilities in the rural areas so that the influx of patients to the metropolitan cities can be reduced.