A Loss We Should Have Stopped to Question

When I first came across the news from Mokhada, Palghar, I expected it to shake us collectively. A young woman, pregnant and in labour, waited through the night for an ambulance that never arrived. When her family, left with no choice, found a private vehicle to take her from one health centre to another, the delay proved fatal. By the time she reached the district hospital, she had lost not only her baby, but the dreams and struggles that had brought them so close to being a family.

But the tragedy did not end there. With no arrangement from the hospital to help the grieving family bring their stillborn child home, and no ambulance willing or available, the father was left with the unimaginable task of carrying his dead baby in a plastic bag on a public bus. The journey stretched 80 kilometres. The weight of that bag, and of his grief, must have been unbearable. On the way, when he sought accountability and asked hard questions, he was allegedly met not with empathy, but with threats and intimidation from the very people tasked with serving and protecting.

And then came the silence, the story couldn't be a part of the national conversation. Maybe all of us were caught up with sensational murders, celebrity tragedies, and the familiar churn of daily drama. But this deeper mystery of how, in 2025, a family could be abandoned at their most vulnerable moment by the very systems meant to protect them; remained unexamined.

This silence, more than anything, is what I find most troubling. It reflects a normalisation of failure. The absence of ambulance services, the lack of basic emergency care, the indignity forced upon this father — these are not just technical lapses. They are signs of how comfortably we accept that some lives, some tragedies, are easier to ignore.

This isn’t just one family’s loss. It points to deeper issues in rural healthcare infrastructure: 

• Public sector facilities often lack reliable ambulances. A study in Uttar Pradesh found only about 46% of rural health centers had access to an ambulance at all, and few offered 24/7 service .

• National ambulance systems like “102” and “108” are in place—but utilisation rates vary dramatically across states, ranging from just 3.5% to 20% for obstetric emergencies

• Rural India suffers from persistent emergency healthcare delays—a key driver in maternal and neonatal deaths

It would be unfair to suggest no one is trying. Across Maharashtra and other parts of the country, there are people who care deeply. Community workers, health volunteers, small-scale initiatives, CSR-backed ambulance services — all working to bridge these gaps. But scattered effort can never be a substitute for systemic accountability.

Real change will not come from isolated acts of goodwill. It will come when we stop treating access to healthcare as a favour granted, and start demanding it as a non-negotiable right. When we start asking why emergency care remains so fragile in places where it is needed most. When we stop being moved by tragedy only for a moment, and start holding systems to account consistently.

And perhaps most importantly, when we stop seeing stories like this as sad but inevitable, and instead see them for what they are: failures that should never have happened — and should never happen again.

So this week, I want to ask: Why do we, as a society, turn our collective gaze away from these quiet tragedies; and what will it take for us to demand the basic dignity that every person, in every corner of our country, deserves? What simple, impactful investments could bridge this rural infrastructure gap?