Indians can do better at improving child survival

Abstract

The author chose the word ‘Indians’ over ‘India’ because every citizen has a role in improving child survival in India and should not leave it to the government alone. Government initiatives such as the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) are laudable but will not be adequate without mobilizing other important stake holders. These stakeholders include all Indians from parents who want to the best for their children to the academicians who need to take responsibility of guiding program managers policy makers and grass root level functionaries. The government programs need to clearly identify the role of each of these stakeholders with inbuilt accountabilities and help them in performing their identified role. In India around 1.7 million children every year which equals 4730 every day and 3 every minute. Most of these deaths occur because many simple interventions which have been available for many decades have still not reached a large proportion of children. Today we live in the “knowledge age.” We can access a large amount of information through the internet and share it easily with others. There has also been tremendous improvement in the availability of modern technology to improve health care. Despite these advances there is a huge gap in converting this advantage to benefit the poor and disadvantaged. There is an unacceptable inequity in health between countries and populations in both access to and capacity to use new technologies. For example skilled attendance at birth is available to only 19% among the poorest quintile as compared to 89% among the wealthiest quintile. Launched on April 12 2005 the NRHM is a commendable effort to address many of the problems in health care delivery in rural areas through ‘communalization’ flexible financing improved management through capacity building monitoring progress against standards and innovations in human resource management.