Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan’s coronavirus treatment highlights India’s inequality in access to health care
- He and his son were hospitalised in one of Mumbai’s best private hospitals while ordinary citizens have been struggling to find a bed
- Bachchan emerged as Bollywood’s premier superstar in the 1970s as India’s answer to Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino
The 77-year-old Bollywood patriarch’s image is ubiquitous across the country on advertisements for everything from hair oil to cement, and his infection – along with actor son Abhishek, daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai and granddaughter Aaradhya – ignited something akin to an outpouring of national grief.
Bachchan’s illness also highlighted one of India’s most acute and chronic inequalities that’s been accentuated by the pandemic: access to quality health care.
He and his son were hospitalised in one of Mumbai’s best private hospitals, although they had only mild symptoms, at a time when ordinary citizens have been struggling to find a bed in crowded state-run hospitals, or are outright denied medical care by private facilities.
As India struggles to contain the world’s third-largest outbreak which is adding nearly 30,000 new cases every day, such inequalities will make it even harder to stem the pathogen’s spread.
