Disrupted megacities and disparities in health care

Abstract

Space and time are the basic notions which provide basis for all modes of thoughts and beliefs. Spatial dimension of health care encompasses this relationship while addressing the questions of what, where, why, and why there? These concerns became significant especially when the scarcity of resources present a critical situation and access of these resources poses a challenge. In developmental domain, cities have always become challenge with their nature of expansion with shift in demand of different services as well as spatial difference in their demands. Some places in cities become growth poles and with enormous pressure on resources, they scramble down and collapse the system. The terms in which the cities are discussed-urban ‘explosion,’ ‘catastrophe’-tend to fit them into a system with lots of problems which are crying out for relief and solutions. Delhi also cannot escape from this enigma and been subjected to increasing socioeconomic vulnerability due to increasing poverty, socio-spatial, and political institutional fragmentation and extreme forms of segregation, disparities, and conflicts. In such disrupted environment, it is a challenging task to deliver health care services to the whole city. This paper focuses on spatial expansion of the National Capital Territory of Delhi over recent times and evolution of health care services in the region. Paper further analyzes spatial coverage of health care institutions and their access by the different socioeconomic groups. Geographical information system (GIS) and remote sensing tools and techniques have been used to analyze the phenomenon. Paper concludes that, there are disparities in health care provisioning in Delhi and these health facilities are not equally accessible to all the population. Distance decay factor makes people’s livelihood cost-effective but it affects their accessibility to health care. In such crucial scenario, the evidencebased decision-making needed information which should be very much precise to the real scenario and can explain the phenomena in a simplistic manner. GIS has this strength as its final product appears as an infographic.