Health Policy Issues and Health Programmes in ... - Amazon S3

Access to Health Services in UttaranchalHence, this paper examines the distribution of villages by population size and the healthinfrastructure in the state with particular reference to accessibility. In addition, the PERFORM(Program Evaluation Review for Organization Resource Management) Survey, carried out in1995, collected information on accessibility to family planning services and the distance to thenearest source. Though the data is related to family planning, it provides the client’s perspectiveand an idea of distances for the client to access the services.Settlement PatternThe distribution of villages by population size in Uttaranchal, according to the 1991 census, hasbeen compiled and presented in Table 1. It revealed that the majority of the villages in the statewere small-sized—more than four-fifths had a population size of less than 500, another 10% hadpopulation sizes ranging between 500 to 999, and the remaining 6% had over 1000 population.District-wise variations were enormous. The percentage of villages with less than 500population varied from a minimum of 25% in Hardwar to a maximum of 95% in Garhwal.Nainital had about 65% of villages with population size less than 500. In the remaining districtsof the state, the population composition of the villages was very small. This finding getsreinforced when analysing the population distribution in rural areas of the state by censusclassification.148Table 1. Percentage Distribution of Villages by Population Size (1991 Census): UttaranchalPopulationDistrict