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The fight against COVID has seen governments marshalling resources from all corners of the society and economy. The armed forces have already asked its retired doctors to return to work so that common citizens can consult them. The Karnataka government has already announced that it would deploy final year students of medicine, paramedical and nursing courses for treatment and assistance of COVID patients. The West Bengal government has turned to a vast network of untrained medical practitioners, who number more than 2.5 lakh and regularly treat patients in the rural and semi-urban areas for help in this desperate fight.

The Mamata Banerjee administration will probably take them through a short course in block, sub divisional and districts hospitals to equip them with the skills of handling COVID patients. Established NGOs who have trained some of these medics have vouched that they can be utilised effectively in the fight.

Truth is often bitter. In many states, these medics form the backbone of the rural healthcare infrastructure. In 2016 WHO said in a report that as much as 57% of the doctors practising allopathy in India never underwent any formal medical training. To compound the situation, there was, and still is, pronounced skewness in the distribution of health workers in the urban and rural regions. Of all health workers, 59.2% were present in the urban areas, where only 27.8% of the population lived, and 40.8% were in rural areas, where 72.2% of the population used to stay.

All states have a huge network of these untrained doctors who treat a large share of the population. To a large section of the rural population in different states, these medical practitioners are the first point of contact when they fall ill. But before any government proceeds to place them in the battlefield, they should be inoculated so that they are not exposed to the deadly infection.