Unhealthy affair

AN EXHAUSTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CHALLENGES INDIA FACES IN THE HEALTH SECTOR

- BANJOT KAUR

NEWSPAPER HEADLINES such as “India to be world’s third largest economy by 2030” are otherwise heartwarming, but the country’s poor health indicators surely dampen the euphoria. Some health indicators are, in fact, so poor that the prediction of an economic glory looks like a bundle of contradictions.

Make Health in India: Reaching a Billion Plus, written by K Srinath Reddy, president of Public Health Foundation of India, is a timely reminder of India’s challenges in the health sector. Reddy was also the chairman of a high-level expert group on health constituted by the erstwhile Planning Commission in 2010. This book, first in the series of Policy Studies, examines the country’s health sector since the 1990s.

It takes off with a chapter on some hard data. Mostly, when data on various health indicators are reported, especially when it shows an improvement in the overall numbers, the point of inter-state variations gets sorely missed. Life expectancy at birth, for instance, improved in India from 59.7 years in 1990 to 70.3 years in 2016. However, women in Uttar Pradesh have 11 years lower life expectancy than their counterparts in Kerala. Similarly, the under-five mortality rate reduced dramatically from 1990 to 2015. But there was a four-fold difference between the highest in Assam and Uttar Pradesh compared to the lowest in Kerala in 2016. Obviously, this calls for a need to push policies that are tailor-made for specific states.