A few days ago, an old friend, a physician, shared a graph that got me puzzled.
It showed an NHFS-5 graph plotting percentage of men with diabetes and hypertension across Indian states. While he was concerned about Kerala being represented as a large dot far ahead of all the other states on these two ailments, it was a smaller green dot caught my attention - Sikkim.
How did this tiny north-eastern Himalayan state full of people who always seemed so healthy, relaxed and friendly top the charts for hypertension in India?
Maybe I was being nostalgic about a trek in Sikkim more than a decade ago, of endless bowls of Thukpa washed down with Dansberg beer. That was a business trip to the main hospital in Gangtok, and these lifestyle diseases certainly did not figure prominently then. What had changed over the years? - was this something to do with the diet?
Another graph presents a different different picture. This one maps a state-wise per-capita collection of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the big surprise here is that Sikkim was the leading state with an average contribution of INR32,568 from each of its ~ 600,000 citizens!
Perhaps this is a pointer to the rapid industrialisation that has taken place in Sikkim over the past decades, with all its attendant health problems. Or maybe there is no correlation at all between these two unrelated indicators.
One thing is for sure - the numbers need to be examined more closely.
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