India’s health indicators show considerable improvement. Infant mortality has gone down as a institutional deliveries have gone up and sex ratio has also improved are up. India’s total fertility rate also went down to 2.2 from 2.7 over the decade. Almost 70% of children have been fully immunized as against 44% in 2005-06. Stunting has declined by 10%. The share of underweight children has fallen from 42.5% to 35.7% in 8 years. The Universal Immunisation Programme which accounts for a moderate investment can be a boon to society. The current standards of awareness and infrastructure have pushed up the number of institutional deliveries from 38.7% to 78.9%. It shows the effectiveness of plan outlay for health though that is grossly inadequate.
Government expenditure on health care is a tad over 1% of GDP against the world average of 5.99%. That is regrettable. Public hospitals are inadequately staffed and have poor infrastructure. The state of health care in villages is pathetic. There is a shortage of 5 lakh doctors in the country. Much more should be done to improve accessible health care across the country. Otherwise the bright picture shown by statistics will be meaningless. Health care without spread of education cannot get very far. In the rural sector, availability of facilities may go a begging.
