India is often celebrated as a global healthcare powerhouse. Gleaming hospitals, cutting-edge technology and medical tourism have become symbols of a nation on the rise. But beyond the billboards and city skylines lies another India—one where access to healthcare can depend on a person’s caste, income, geography or even the strength of an internet connection.
In Staying Alive, physician and public health practitioner Ramani Atkuri takes readers into that overlooked world with remarkable clarity, compassion and urgency.
Drawing on more than three decades of work in the rural and tribal regions of Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, Atkuri offers a sobering portrait of a healthcare system that continues to fail millions of its most vulnerable citizens. This is not a book of distant policy debates; it is a chronicle of lives suspended between neglect and survival.
At the heart of the book is a stark contradiction. While India aspires to be a global destination for healthcare, public spending on health remains far below what experts recommend. The consequences of this shortfall are visible everywhere: understaffed clinics, inadequate infrastructure, unreliable data systems and policies that often bear little resemblance to realities on the ground.
Yet Staying Alive never allows numbers to overshadow people.
A migrant worker learns that tuberculosis can become a life sentence. A farmer struggles to find anti-venom after a snake bite. A rural mother approaches childbirth with fear rather than certainty. A tribal child is denied a midday meal because digital connectivity has failed where human intervention should have prevailed.
Through these stories, Atkuri reveals that health inequality in India is neither accidental nor isolated. It is deeply intertwined with caste, class, gender and geography, shaping who receives care and who is quietly left behind.
What gives the book its emotional force is Atkuri’s perspective as both doctor and witness. She writes with the precision of a public health expert but also with the empathy of someone who has spent decades listening to communities rarely represented in mainstream narratives. Her prose is measured, her critique incisive and her commitment to equity unwavering.
More than an examination of a broken system, Staying Alive is a challenge to the nation’s conscience. It compels readers to ask an uncomfortable but necessary question: what does progress truly mean if vast sections of the population are still struggling to access the most basic forms of care?
Thoughtful, unsparing and deeply humane, Staying Alive is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the realities that exist beyond India’s celebrated healthcare success stories. It is a powerful reminder that the true test of a nation’s health lies not in its finest hospitals, but in whether every citizen—regardless of where they live—has an equal chance to survive and thrive.
