Changing Health Scenario

Health is among the fundamental rights of the people. Yet health services in Uttar Pradesh are in a shambles notwithstanding existence of an elaborate network of government health facilities:

• One trained health worker per 1,000 rural population
• One trained dai per 1,000 rural population
• One sub-centre per 5,000 rural population manned by two health workers, one woman and other man
• One primary health centre per 30,000 rural population
• One community health centre per 100,000 population or at block level

For making referral services available to the people, six sub-centres have been attached to a primary health centre and four primary health centres to a community health centre. All the community health centres are attached to a district hospital.

But the network suffers from shortage of human resource, equipments, medicines and above all attitudinal problems. As a result, the government health machinery in the state caters largely to those people who are in a capacity to pay for their medical care and ignores those millions of poor for whom even two squares of meals is a distant dream. Stories of callousness on the part of the health service providers towards these poor people abound.