Ethics, equity and genocide.

India is one of the most inequitable societies on earth, and certainly when its size is taken into consideration, we are responsible for a sizeable proportion of the sum total of human misery on this planet. As health professionals, we have access to data that goes beyond the Dandekars and Tendulkars and Arjun Senguptas, and which we can read off the bodies of our study subjects. We have become inured to the knowledge that, in India, 47% of our children under the age of five are malnourished by weight-for-age criteria. In the last six years, more children have died, across the world, of malnutritionrelated causes than the total number of adults who died in the six years of the Second World War. but let that pass. The next datum that I will place before you is this: 26% of our newborn babies are low birth weight for gestational age. Please remember that this 26% is not randomly distributed across the population, but occurs far more commonly in specific communities, obeying the pressures of inequity and social injustice. And then project barker’s hypothesis no longer just a hypothesis, alas onto their future trajectories. See if it helps you sleep at night.