When Bereft of Care

This book is a careful examination of the profound injustices that mark the global landscape of health care access. It interrogates what it means to regard health not as charity, a privilege, or a commodity, but as a fundamental human right – and what governments, institutions and societies have done, or failed to do, to realise this Right with equity, justice and dignity. Grounded in the author’s lived encounters with the most marginalised people – those living with hunger, homelessness, leprosy, TB or mental illness, especially in India – When Bereft of Care traverses geographies, policy discourses and political Systems to study how social, economic and legal structures systematically exclude billions from timely, effective and life-saving health care. It holds up a moral mirror to the fact that millions still die of curable diseases not because treatments do not exist, but because access remains gated by wealth, caste, race, citizenship and power, because only some lives are considered to be of value and millions of other lives dispensable. The book critically explores themes ranging from the commercialisation of Health care and the unaccountable rise of the private sector to the implications of intellectual property regimes and the urgent need to reimagine health worker education. Drawing from global data and constitutional case law from select countries, it analyses Health systems both rich and resourceless, highlighting both important examples of public provisioning and cautionary tales of systemic neglect. Yet the book is not merely an indictment; it is also an appeal. An appeal for Governments to centre justice in health systems, for the law to be a shield rather than a sieve and for societies to refuse the normalisation of inequality in life and death. It concludes by urging that health care must be re-anchored in the ethics of care and public responsibility, of the affirmation of the equal worth of every human life and with the recognition that the truest test of a civilised society is not how it treats its privileged, but how it protects its most vulnerable people.