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Written By: Admin | Updated : April 3, 2015 5:28 PM IST
While Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad might claim that India has taken great strides in the healthcare field and there has also been significant improvement in health indicators like infant and maternal mortality the fact remains that the figures are still the worst in the whole world. More women and children die in India due to simple causes like lack of safe drinking water and poor nutrition than anywhere else in the world. We still have the highest number of pre-term deaths, 50% of all Indian children are either stunted or wasted due to poor nutrition and nutrition levels particularly among women are very low. To add to that we are currently playing host to a dangerous version of highly infectious form of tuberculosis and communicable diseases like swine flu, malaria, encephalitis and dengue have become seasonal. And we are not just battling developing world diseases - there's been an exponential rise in the cases of non-communicable diseases like cancer, heart diseases,diabetes, hypertension and COPD
Did we falter at the start?
It's hard to pinpoint the exact problem. Why can't one of the fastest growing economies in the world address the most basic rights that are due to its citizens the right to good health? The problem can actually be pinpointed to when we were a freshly born nation in 1947. While the Constitution was being drafted, there were plans to introduce a National Health Service similar to NHS, UK which is the hallmark of healthcare services around the world but the 'Right to Health' somehow slipped passed our forefathers' visions.
So as our founding fathers set upon a nation-building exercise expanding the military and building roads, health along with education two of the biggest social indicators of well-being were neglected. And proper health and education would've played a far more important role in nation building than guns and roads. Proper education would've made people more aware of the dangers of ill-health, what foods to eat for better nutrition and the family planning method. Economists including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen have often lamented how India could've been a far more powerful economy if only it had taken care of the two 'soft' sectors health and education.
Are things better now?
It's not like the government has totally ignored the health of its citizens. Vaccines for children are very common and most children receive them to prevent numerous ailments. These efforts have borne fruit with India eradicating polio two years ago. However, the solution isn't that simple. Most people in this country still don't have access to even the most basic healthcare services. When women suffer from ailments, they often don't get the treatment they need, even in educated and urban families. A boy child is more likely to get better nutrition than the girl child. There are no hospitals in rural areas, doctors don't want to go there and those that do lament that there's no equipment to treat people properly. Because of open defecation and lack of access to safe drinking water diseases like diarrhoea continue to cause millions of deaths.
Despite all the aforementioned problems, the government only continues to pay lip service to its recent promise to provide universal health coverage. A prime example that the government is not serious is the shelving of the National Health Bill that had been drafted three years ago. Despite, increased allocations to various health-related sectors there still remains a lack of accountability about how the funds are being used. There have been accounts of millions of rupees being diverted from the National Rural Health Mission by a state government to fill their own pockets (UP-NRHM Scam). Despite widespread calls for the same during the budget, healthcare wasn't granted infrastructure status nor was any proper plan set in place to improve accountability of how money was being spent.
Before we can address all the above issues, there's no reason to believe that the meagre steps we've taken in the field of healthcare is any cause for celebration or acknowledgement.
