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

Session 1Inaugural SessionInaugural SessionInaugural SessionJ C Pant, former Secretary, Government of India, andChairman, Disaster Management CellHealth issues should be reviewed in a broad perspective. For instance, if wedo rainwater conservation and if this can be done as a people’s movement,then you have all the springs of Uttaranchal revived, which means that cleandrinking water is available to every village. Therefore, this whole concept ofpublic health has to be woven into health policy, though it will haveramifications for the development sector. This can become a people’smovement and I am sure if this question of keeping the rivers clean can betaken up as a movement with the ‘Sants’ and ‘Swamis’ of Hardwar, then I’msure they’ll be willing to join us in this effort because from Gangotri down,the ‘Babas’ are also polluting the Ganga. I’m sure that if we can persuadethem, they’ll stop doing it. It’s the idea of picking up these polythene bagsoccasionally, once in a while. I had a friend visiting India from Australia. InAustralia, they observe one week every year for cleaning up Australia.Everyone just comes out of his/her house and cleans the whole place; that isthe type of effort required.Uttaranchal has several voluntary agencies, although some of them are forthe sake of registration alone. However, the active voluntary agenciesnumber at least 100; I have them in my directory at home. We can call, say, aconference of about 100 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) later thismonth. I had asked Alok Jain to organize one such conference and interactwith them so that you have people’s participation.Gadde Narayana, Country Director, POLICY Project, TheFutures Group InternationalThe Uttaranchal Government, a couple of months back, made a decision tohave a comprehensive and integrated health and population policy for thestate. Other states, like Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, andMadhya Pradesh, also have policies but those policies are only populationpolicies, although they include reproductive health elements. Uttaranchal1