Death By Sugar!

As diabetes tightens its lethal grip on more and more indians, new research, treatments, drugs and delivery mechanisms help us understand the nature of the beast. But how can we beat it?

- Damayanti Datta

Politics and policy often drive public health. And if the number of times a word used by the prime minister is any measure of its significance, then diabetes is the public health disaster of our time. “Bad governance is worse than diabetes.” So said Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2014 in a Rajya Sabha speech. Ever since, he has called diabetes the “biggest threat” facing India; cautioned against the coming “diabetes epidemic” in his radio broadcasts; exhorted all on Twitter to “defeat diabetes”; urged the nation to fight diabetes through yoga.

Until the morning of April 14, nothing exceptional had ever happened at Jangla, except bomb blasts and gunfire. At the heart of the Naxal terror trail, penned in by tall teak forests, this remote Chhattisgarh village has never seen a railway station, a bank, not even an MBBS doctor. But on that day it hit the national news, as Modi visited to launch the first health and wellness centre under the Ayushman Bharat reforms announced in Budget 2018. “We screened the entire population for five lifestyle diseases,” says Dr Vinod K. Paul, Member, Niti Aayog, and architect of the scheme. One of the first beneficiaries was a young woman diagnosed with uncontrolled diabetes. Like 70 per cent Indians, she had no clue about it. The PM mentioned her in his speech as emblematic of the kind of healthcare advantage he wished for all Indians.

THE SUGAR RUSH