A woman selecting a sanitary pad. Getty ImagesYou want to phase out corruption and black market from India? Go ahead and do it! But the government could have done its homework before letting lose the Good and Service Tax (GST) that has created confusion in all walks of life.
The worst hit is the pharmaceutical sector. A clear picture on the effect of the GST is yet to emerge. Lists that appear on the media are contradictory. Nobody knows if the prices have actually increased or decreased. How are you supposed to put a price on your medicines without sufficient information? Aren’t they supposed to be essential items?
The implementation of the GST should have preceded by exact planning and awareness creation. The government had scant regard for people’s opinion when it picked stuff to increase or decrease prices. Sanitary napkins and diapers, for instance, now have a tax of 12 percent. Any government which was sympathetic to women would have done away with tax from these items.
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Gone are the days when women stayed at home. They now work shoulder to shoulder with men. They travel a lot. They cannot but use sanitary napkins. Blood is a fertile ground for germs to grow. Menstruating women have to change their napkins every four hours at least. Many women keep the napkins much longer because they had cost them dearly. This leads to medical complications that can turn fatal, including urinary infection (that can affect kidneys in the case of diabetics) and uterine infection.
Any mother would tell you about the difficulties of traveling with a child without diapers. Each administrative reform cements the perspective that nobody cares about the well-being of women. Paying lip service to the mother won’t do. You have to practice what you preach. The tax reforms was an opportunity lost.
Prime minister Narendra Modi seems ignorant of the problems faced by more than half of Indians - women. There is no dearth of advisers in this country. There are no advisers on women though. And there are no women among advisers.
(The writer is the managing director of Malabar Hospitals in Kozhikode and a former state president of the women’s wing of the Indian Medical Association.)
