No one dies of ant bites in the eye, but that is not the point. When a patient is so neglected in the hospital that ants can bite her bandaged eye, it is impossible for her family to believe that her decline and death are not the outcome of the same inhuman neglect. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, has expressed his indifference to the criticism of newspapers. He was not speaking of this particular patient?s death, but then, he does not need to. There is a shamefully long list of cases of death allegedly caused by neglect in the state government hospitals ? three in November alone. The chief minister?s intentions are of the best, his dreams, as always, the finest. It is not true that everything has failed, even if the newspapers say so. There are certainly ?lacunae, lapses and problems? ? which would include, presumably, death by vagueness ? but the government was going to improve the healthcare system by upgrading human resources and infrastructure.

While it would be wonderful for the state should the wishes of the chief minister be fulfilled, it falls to the lot of the man in search of a hospital bed to remember, with fear and trembling, that good intentions do not ensure care and cure. The road map of good intentions would also prove interesting. The government hospitals were conceived as fine institutions; does the decline of the last 20 or so years mean that there were no good intentions before this? What was wrong with the human resources? Perhaps the government would be able to say which policies and which administrative actions and inactions weakened the foundations of a system once attended by the finest doctors and teachers. The corruption and filth, the contemptuous neglect with which patients are treated, have nothing to do with the number of patients that are treated there; that cannot be the excuse. The root of present ills has to be addressed first, and with honesty, before any new plan can work.