Best Movement in My Life

8/11/2019 Best Movement in My Life

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BEST MOVEMENT IN MY LIFE

Best movement in my life when I got the maximum trophies for

CCA in my previous school (NAVY CHILDREN SCHOOL

,KARWAR). I won six trophies. There were three 3rd

prize trophies, one

2nd

prize trophy and two 1stprize trophies. The school was newly

established and fourth class was the highest class in the school. I wasstudying in fourth standard. It was my birthday when the CCA prizes

were distributed. It was already a special day as it was my birthday and

it was more special when I got to know that I am the maximum prize

winner in the school. Getting so many prizes was an awesome feeling; it

was the best movement in my life.The same could be said of india's health system. Sixtyyears after independence, India remains one of the unhealthiest places on earth. Millions of people still

suffer from diseases and ailments that simply no longer exist almost anywhere else on the planet. Four

out of five children are anemic. Almost one in four women who give birth receives no antenatal care.

What makes the picture even bleaker is the fact that India's economic boom has had, so far at least, little

impact on health standards. Think of it this way: in the five years between 2001 and 2006 India's

economy grew almost 50%, the country's biggest expansion in decades. Meantime, its child-malnutrition

rate, a number that measures the percentage of children under 3 who are moderately or severely

underweight, dropped just a single percentage point, to 46%. That's worse than in most African countries,

and means almost half India's children remain at risk of "health problems such as stunted growth, mental

retardation, and increased susceptibility to infectious diseases," according to the most recent National

Family Health Survey, a study of more than 230,000 people, from which the figures are taken.

Perversely, the incredible economic growth is having an impact in other ways, driving up rates of rich-

world diseases such as obesity and diabetes and encouraging high-end health services, some of which

offer world-class care but remain far beyond the reach of the vast majority of Indians. It's these services

think of last year's surgery to save an Indian girl born with four arms and four legs and the skill of

India's world-class doctors that the country brags about when its marketers sell India as a medical-

tourism destination and an emerging health-services giant. The truth behind the glossy advertising is less

incredible: India remains the sick man of Asia, malnourished and obese at the same time, beset by

epidemics of AIDS and diabetes, and with spending levels on public health that even Prime Minister

Manmohan Singh has conceded "are seriously lagging behind other developing countries in Asia."

The sorry state of India's medical services might not matter so much if tens of millions of Indians weren't

already so sick. Part of the problem is the lack of infrastructure not fancy hospitals or equipment but

basic services such as clean water, a functioning sewage system, power. The World Health Organization

estimates that more than 900,000 Indians die every year from drinking bad water and breathing bad air.The Indian government says that 55% of households have no toilet facilities. Many cities lack sewers. The

missing infrastructure is not unique to India. Parts of Africa face similar underdevelopment. But some

public-health experts believe that India's massive population adds to the burden, overloading systems

where they do exist and aiding the spread of disease in the many places they don't.

There are other reasons for India's ill health. Over the past decade or so, funding for public-health

initiatives such as immunization drives and programs to control the spread of communicable diseases has


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been cut; some critics blame shifting government priorities. One of the best ways a country can improve

its health, for instance, is by making sure its children are immunized against measles, polio and other life-

threatening illnesses. But immunization rates in India are significantly lower than in other developing

nations such as Bangladesh, China and Indonesia. Just 43.5% of very young children are fully

immunized. "It's shameful," says A.K. Shiva Kumar, an economist and public-health expert who consults

to the United Nations Children Fund in India and was a member of the government's recently disbandedNational Advisory Council. "All this high income, this growth of the past few years is well and good, but

numbers like this show you can't get complacent about health or you'll go nowhere."

Cycle of Illness

In the past few years, diseases such as dengue fever, viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria and

pneumonia "have returned in force or have developed a stubborn resistance to drugs," according to a

report on health care in India by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. "This troubling trend can be

attributed in part to substandard housing, inadequate water, sewage and waste management systems, a

crumbling public health infrastructure, and increased air travel." Pylore Krishnaier Rajagopalan, who was

head of the government Vector Control Research Centre in the southern city of Pondicherry between

1975 and 1990, blames policies that concentrate on the latest scientific techniques and not enough onbasic controls. "Field work is almost dead," Rajagopalan says. "These mosquitoes are sun loving. How

can a shade-loving, lab-bound, white-coated scientist control the mosquitoes through research? It may be

the future but millions of people in India are suffering and dying now because we're not doing the basics."

If all that explains why Indians are so sick, look to public hospitals and medical services to understand

why they are not getting better. In many parts of the country, but especially in rural India, where two-thirds

of the population lives, health services are poor to nonexistent. Clinics are badly maintained and

equipped. India needs hundreds of thousands more doctors and more than a million more nurses.

Current staff often don't turn up for work. "It is a well-recognized fact that the system of public delivery of

health services in India today is in crisis," begins the paper "Understanding Government Failure in Public

Health Services" published in the influential Economic and Political Weeklylast October. "Recentanalyses show that high absenteeism, low quality in clinical care, low satisfaction with care and rampant

corruption plague the system."

Such dire conditions force millions of people to head to the better public hospitals in India's cities. The Dr.

Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital (RML) in New Delhi is well maintained, relatively clean and is probably one

of the best. Unlike most hospitals, which get their funding from state governments, the RML is financed

directly by the central government and caters to the thousands of public servants and senior government

officers, including members of Parliament, who are lucky enough to have state-funded medical insurance.

But its high standards are also a magnet for sick people for hundreds of miles around. About 60% of the

4,500 patients the hospital sees every day travel not from the New Delhi area but from neighboring

states. Some of them are complicated cases that have rightly been referred to a tertiary-care hospital, butmany are simple cases of malaria or dengue fever that other hospitals should treat easily. "The challenge

is that our facilities are totally at saturation point," says Dr. Nishith K. Chaturvedi, the hospital's medical

superintendent. "If states were doing a better job it would cut our case load by 35%."

The crush of numbers means that the RML is sometimes forced to have patients share beds. "For a short

period only," Dr. Chaturvedi says, looking slightly sheepish. "But it happens." A tour of the emergency and

outpatient departments brings the problem into stark relief: the crowds of patients and visiting relatives


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immunization over the past few years now have better coverage than richer states, where immunization

has actually slipped.

Other sacred cows will need to be challenged. India's old socialist system may have had its problems,

says Imrana Qadeer, one of India's foremost public-health experts, but the belief that private enterprise

can cure all of India's woes is dangerously misguided. "The private sector doesn't want to do basic thingslike treating diarrhea, improving nutrition, immunizing babies because that's not where the money is,"

says Qadeer. "In India we cannot live without a strong public sector."

In the end that will mean spending hundreds of billions of dollars more on public health, perhaps even

creating a

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