KEY ACHIEVEMENTS IN HEALTH − Rakyat Biologi

Our overall achievement in regard to longevity and other key health indicators are impressive but in many respects uneven across States, The two Data Annexure at the end indicate selected health demographic and economic indicators and highlight the changes between 1951and 2001. In the past five decades life expectancy has increased from 50 years to over 64 in 2000. IMR has come down from 1476 to 7. Crude birth rates have dropped to 26.1 and death rates to 8.7.

At this stage, a process understanding of longevity and child health may be useful for understanding progress in future. Longevity, always a key national goal, is not merely the reduction of deaths as a result of better medical and rehabilitative care at old age. In fact without reasonable quality of life in the extended years marked by self-confidence and absence of undue dependency longevity may men only a display of technical skills. So quality of life requires as much external bio-medical interventions as culture based acceptance of inevitable decline in faculties without officious start at sixty but run across life lived at alt ages in reduction of mortality among infants through immunization and nutrition interventions and reduction of mortality among young and middle aged adults, including adolescents getting inform about sexuality reproduction and safe motherhood. At the same time, some segments will remain always more vulnerable - such as women due to patriarchy and traditions of infra-family denial), aged (whose survival but not always development will increase with immunization) and the disabled (constituting a tenth of the population).

Reduction in child mortality involves as much attention to protecting children from infection as in ensuring nutrition and calls for a holistic view of mother and child health services. The cluster of services consisting of antenatal services, delivery care and post mortem attention and low birth weight, childhood diarrhoea and ARI management are linked priorities. Programme of immunization and childhood nutrition seen in better performing stats indicate sustained attention to routine and complex investments into growing children as a group to make them grow into persons capable of living long and well Often interest fades in pursuing the unglamorous routine of supervised immunization and is substituted by pulse campaigns etc. Which in the long run turn out counter-productive. Indeed persistence with improved routines and care for quality in immunization would also be a path way to reduce the world's highest rate of maternal mortality.

In this context we may refer to the large ratio-based rural health infrastructure consisting of over 5 lakh trained doctors working under plural systems of medicine and a vast frontline force of over 7 lakh ANMs, MPWS and Anganwadi workers besides community volunteers. The creation of such public work force should be seen as a major achievement in a country short of resources and struggling with great disparities in health status. As part of rural Primary health care network lone, a total of 1.6 lakh subcenters, (with 1.27 lakh.' ANMa in position) and 22975 PHCs and 2935 CHCs (with over 24000 doctors and over 3500 specialists to serve in them) have been set up. To promote Indian systems of medicine and homeopathy there are over 22000 dispensaries 2800 hospitals Besides 6 lakh angawadis serve nutrition needs of nearly 20 million children and 4 million mothers. The total effort has cost the bulk of the health development outlay, which stood at over Rs 62.500/- crores or 3-64 % of total plan spending during the last fifty years.

On any count these are extraordinary infrastructural capacities created with resources committed against odds to strengthen grass roots. There have been facility gaps, supply gaps and staffing gaps, which can be filled up only by allocating about 20% more funds and determined ill to ensure good administration and synergy from greater congruence of services, but given the sheer size of the endeavor thee wilt always be some failure of commitment and in routine functioning. These get exacerbated by periodic campaign mode and vertical programme, which have only increased compartmentalized vision and over-medicalization of health problems. The initial key mistake arose from the needless bifurcation of health and family welfare and nutrition functions at all levels instead of promoting more holism. As a result of all this the structure has been precluded from reaching its optimal potential. It has got more firmly established at the periphery/sub-center level and dedicated to RCH services only. At PHC and CHC levels this has further been compounded by a weak referral system. There has not been enough convergence in "escorting" children through immunization coverage and nutrition education of mothers and ensuring better food to children, including cooked midday meals and health checks al schools. There has also been no constructive engagement between allopathic and indigenous systems to build synergies, which could have improved people's perceptions of benefits from the infrastructure in ways that made sense to them.

One key task in the coming decades is therefore to utilize fully that created potential by attending to well known organizational motivational and financial gaps. The gaps have arisen partly from the source and scale of funds and partly due to lack of persistence, both of which can be set right. PHCs and CHCs are funded by States several of whom are unable to match Central assistance offered and hence these centers remain inadequate and operate on minimum efficiency. On the other hand over two thirds cost of three fourths of sub-centers are fully met by the Center due to their key role m family welfare services. But in equal part these gaps are due to many other non-monetary factors such as undue centralization and uniformity, fluctuating commitment to key routines at ground level, insufficient experimentation with alternatives such as getting public duties discharged through private professionals and ensuring greater local accountability to users.

Health Status issues

The difference between rural and urban indiactors of health status and the wide interstate disparity in health status are well known. Clearly the urban rural differentials are substantial and range from childhood and go on increasing the gap as one grows up to 5 years. Sheer survival apart there is also the we known under provision in rural areas in practically all social sector services. For the children growing up in rural areas the disparities naturally tend to get even worse when compounded by the widely practiced discrimination against women, starting with foeticide of daughters.

In spite of overall achievement it is a mixed record of social development specially failing in involving people in imaginative ways. Even the averaged out good performance ides wide variations by social class or gender or region or State. The classes in may States have had to suffer the most due to lack of access or denial of access or social exclusion or all of them. This is clear from the fact that compared to the riches quintile, the poorest had 2.5 times more IMR and child mortality, TFR at double the rates and nearly 75% malnutrition - particularly during the nineties.

Not only are the gaps between the better performing and other States wide but in same cases have been increasing during the nineties. Large differences also exist between districts within the same better performing State urban areas appear to have better health outcomes than rural areas although the figures may not fully reflect the situation in urban and peri-urban slums with large in migration with conditions comparable to rural pockets. It is estimated that urban slum population wilt grow at double the rate of urban population growth in the next few decades. India may have by 202 a total urban population of close to 600 million living in urban areas with an estimated 145 million living in slums in 2001. What should be a fair measure for assessing success in enhancing health status of population I any forecast on health care?

Disease Load in India and China:

We need a basis for comparative scenario building. Among the nations of the world China alone rank in size and scale and in complexity comparable to India differences between an open and free society and a semi-controlled polity do matter. The remarkable success in China in combating disease is due to sustained attention on the health of the young in China, and of public policy backed by resources and social mobilization- While comparing China and India in selected aspects of disease load, demography and public expenditures on health, the record on India may seem mixed compared to the more all round progress made by china. But this should also be seen in the perspective of the larger burden of disease in India compared to china and of the transactional costs of an open and free democracy,

Though India and China recorded the same rate of growth till 70s, China initiated reforms a full decade earlier. This gave it a head stat for a higher growth rate and has resulted in an economic gap with India which has become wider over time. This is because domestic savings in China are 36% of GDP whereas in India it hovers at 23%, mostly in house-hold savings. Again. China attracted $40 billion in foreign direct investment against $2 billion in India. Special economic zones and relaxed labour laws have helped. Public expenditure on health in China has been consistently higher underlining the regressive nature of financing of health are in India. Nevertheless- it is not too unrealistic to expect that India should be able to reach by 2010 at least three fourth the current level of performance of China in all key health indices. India's current population is not a bit more than 75% that of China and India will of course be catching up even more with China into the 21 century. This would be offset by the handicap that Indian progress will be moderated by the fact that it is an open free and democratic society. A practical rule-of-thumb measure for an optimistic forecast of future progress in India could be - that between 2000 and 2010 India should do three fourths as well as China did in 1990-2000 and, after 2010, India should try to catch up with the rate of performance of China and do just as well thereafter. This will translate into, for, instance, a growth rate of about 8% for India till 2010 and as close to 10% as possible thereafter thus enabling doubling first in ten yeas and doubling first in ten year and doubling twice over every seven years thereafter prior to 2025. keeping this perspective in mind, we may now examine the profile of major disease control effort; the effectiveness of available instruments for delivery and financing public health action and assess factors relevant to the remaining event of vulnerability within jout emerging social pyramid over next two or three decades,