Title: No discrimination
(Insurance law must be revisited to remove unreasonable exclusions in health policies)
• The Delhi High Court’s order striking down a discriminatory exclusion clause in a health insurance policy, and upholding the claim of a patient, should have the broader effect of eliminating similar exclusions.
• The case involved a rare heart condition based on which United India Insurance Company rejected the claim, viewing it as a manifestation of a genetic disorder.
• By its very nature, such exclusion defeats the purpose of the health policy. But then, policies sold to individuals invariably contain a plethora of exclusions in the fine print, diminishing their practical value. They are heavily weighted in favour of the insurer.
• The court has struck a blow for the rights of the individual by holding that exclusion of the kind invoked does not just involve a contractual issue between the two sides, but the basic right to health flowing from Article 21 of the Constitution.
• It has gone further to interpret the right to health as being meaningful only with the right to health care, and by extension, health insurance required to access it. This is good advice.
• The Centre, which has committed itself to a universal National Health Protection Scheme, and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority would do well to heed it. They must review all the policies, and eliminate unreasonable exclusionary clauses designed to avoid claims.
• Several studies have pointed out that health insurance in India suffers from lack of scale, covering only about 29% of the households surveyed under the National Family Health Survey-4, that too in a limited way. The health-care system also lacks regulation of costs.
• There is asymmetry of information, with the insured member unable to assess the real scope of the policy or negotiate the terms with the provider.
• Questions such as these led to the enactment of a new health-care law in the United States during the Barack Obama administration, whereby strict obligations were placed on insurers and unreasonable exclusions removed. India’s health insurance and hospital sectors closely follow the American pattern, and are in need of strong regulation. This is necessary to define costs, curb frauds and empower patients.
• As the Delhi High Court has observed, exclusions cannot be unreasonable or based on a broad parameter such as genetic disposition or heritage. Insurance law has to be revisited to also ensure that there is a guaranteed renewal of policies, that age is no bar for entry, and pre-existing conditions are uniformly covered.
• Problems of exclusion will be eliminated if the payer-insurer is the state, the financing is done through public taxes, and coverage is universal. Given its stated intent to ensure financial protection against high health costs, India should adopt such a course.
• The short-term priority is to remove discriminatory clauses in policies and expand coverage to as many people as possible.
Title: Into priesthood
(Does training Dalits to become priests break down caste hierarchy or create another layer of stratification?)
Under normal circumstances, the training of 500 Dalit and tribal youth by a conservative religious institution such as the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), with the aim of helping them become priests in Hindu temples, would be hailed as a reformative and a revolutionary step, even in a region that has seen the worst of caste oppression symbolised by the violence against Dalits in Karamchedu and Tsunduru.
For progressive Hindus, such a programme would represent long-overdue inclusive, perhaps disruptive, social engineering that could bring marginalised communities, previously barred from entering temples for fear of “impurity”, into the mainstream.
Elevating a few from among these oppressed communities to priesthood, even in small neighbourhood temples of the TTD in Andhra Pradesh, could serve as a reparation of sorts.
However, for status quoists, drenched as they tend to be in “pure” orthodoxy, this initiative to appoint Dalit and lower caste priests by the end of March is apparently being considered a breach of their exclusive privilege.
The arguments made against the proposal appear to question whether those who eat non-vegetarian food, or have a variety of other such lifestyle habits that differ from those of the privileged class, could endure the rigours of maintaining “purity from outside and inside” and be able to chant mantras.
What is conveniently forgotten is that the Supreme Court in 2015 held that caste and birth should not determine induction of priests in temples. Rather, domain knowledge, traditional codes of practice, and the Constitution’s guarantee of equality before law should be applied.
Imagine a non-Brahmin boy born to poor daily wagers, wearing the archetypal dhoti and entering the sanctum sanctorum of a local temple to render mantras with a flourish and perform pujas. This suggests that rigid, divisive caste hierarchy may be on the wane.
Despite these small steps forward, some activists describe it as “window dressing”.
For Kancha Ilaiah,
Unless Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis are trained in proper theological schools and appointed in main temples like Tirumala, Hinduism does not become a spiritual democratic system, its spiritual fascist system will continue.
Vocabulary words:
Priesthood (noun) = Priests in general (पुजारी)
Stratification (noun) = The arrangement or classification of something into different groups (विभाजन)
Conservative (adj) = Traditionalist, orthodox (रूढ़िवादी)
Oppression (noun) = Suppression (उत्पीड़न)
Overdue (adj) = Not done by the expected time (अतिशोध्य)
Reparation (noun) = Amends, the action of repairing something (हानिपूर्ति)
Exclusions (noun) = The process of excluding (बहिष्करण)
Manifestation (noun) = The fact of showing something (प्रकटीकरण)
Plethora (noun) = A large or excessive amount of something (बहुतायत)
Fine print (noun) = Small print
Strike a blow (idiom) = To do something that supports
Invoke (verb) = Cite or appeal to an authority (आह्वान करना)
Interpret (verb) = Explain the meaning of (व्याख्या करना)
Asymmetry (noun) = Lack of equality (विषमता)
Disposition (noun) = Nature, character (स्वभाव)
Revisit (verb) = Consider again from a different perspective (दोबारा गौर करना)
Quo (Latin phrase) = The existing state of affairs (यथास्थिति)
Breach (noun) = Violation (उल्लंघन)
Endure (verb) = Remain in existence (टिकना)
Wane (verb) = Decrease, decline (पतन)
Final words
The other challenge for this initiative is to demonstrate why it is even a priority to train Dalits to become priests.
Are we unwittingly creating another social layer or a “sanskritised class of purity” when what we should focus on is creating a contemporary era of scientific and rationale thinking?
Didn’t even B.R. Ambedkar speak of the limitations of temple entry for Dalits? Wouldn’t the monies deployed be better spent on quality schools in Dalit and tribal habitations?
