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

Inaugural SessionMadhukar Gupta, Chief Secretary, Government of UttaranchalI am indeed very happy and honoured to be able to have this opportunity of being here amidstyou today and to have such a presence gathered here to deliberate on and discuss thisexceedingly important issue. As has already been said, the first elected Government ofUttaranchal, immediately upon getting the reins of government, made an announcement in thehouse that a health policy would be formulated within three months. In that context, I’mextremely grateful to USAID and the POLICY Project; they have stepped in an extremely timelymanner to enable us to go through this important exercise.One issue that has been raised is that there are policies for population in various states, butthere are no policies for health. That is a very, very important question: what are the policies onhealth going to say? Is it going to set some quantitative targets? Is it going to set somequalitative targets? What is it going to do? To that extent, I think this whole process ofconsultation, which has been possible last week and today, will determine the objectives andthe strategies for the state. I hope the consultation process will not end here, in this very, veryvital area. When I say future consultations, I would suggest to everybody involved that we havethese consultations with a level of experts who can bring in experience from other states, whocan bring in experience from other countries, who can bring in statistics and data that havebeen researched and analysed. Thereafter, whatever we formulate, I think we will need to take itcloser to the grass-roots level in the form of workshops or consultations with publicrepresentatives or NGO representatives and so on. Then, whatever we do will have aparticipatory aspect about it, and it will not be felt at the end of the day by the beneficiary, bythe ultimate beneficiary, that this is something that has been provided to him from, let us say,the confines of a place like we are gathered in today. As for the policy itself, so much has alreadybeen said by all the people who can really contribute to the process that I find it very difficult tosay anything more or new, except to partly repeat what has been said.On the face of it, there are lots of very interesting indicators insofar as health is concerned—even issues like literacy and the sex ratio and so on. But there is so much hidden in thoseindicators and I think some of the points that were mentioned by Mr Pant, Mr Narayana,Ms Chhabra, and Mr Jain are extremely illuminating and would show that within this wholething is hidden a scenario that one could actually call pretty grim that we need to look at very,very seriously. Some of the issues have already been mentioned—some of the issues that wouldbe relevant to the point of the health policy we might make.Repeatedly, the first and most important issue that comes up relates to access and we have ourproblems. A comparative indication was made vis-ã-vis Himachal Pradesh (HP). Let me justmention that the population of Uttaranchal is almost 25 lakh more than HP and that, of course,would be largely on account of the fact that we have large plains districts in Udham Singh Nagar,Dehradun, and Hardwar. So when you are looking at the hills, that position would be perhapsmore comparable. HP has been in existence as a state for 30 years now so they have been luckyin the sense that they have had time to develop their infrastructure, village connectivity, healthinfrastructure, and all the issues that go into this business of access. Today, of the 16,500 villagesthat we have in Uttaranchal, as many as 8000 are not connected by all-weather roads. Mr Pant6