2030 Agenda and India: Moving from Quantity to Quality by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789813290914
Publisher: Springer Singapore

2.Secondly, we have the National Health Protection Scheme for 10.74 crore poor and needy families who would benefit from the scheme. This provides free secondary and tertiary care treatment for serious illnesses. Through this, approximately 50 crore nationals will be able to avail of free treatment up to Rs. 5 lakh per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation. As per National Health Authority website, more than 26 lakh people benefitted from the scheme by end of May 2019.

Its success is critical for the country’s healthcare development and could play a significant role in reducing healthcare costs borne by the households. This vision requires a strong regulatory framework, clear financial outlays and implementation plans. The state and center need to work together and also leverage the resources, skills and expertize of the private sector. Equitable access to health services would require maintaining the continuum of care and ensuring a strong community-based monitoring system supported by community health workers. Separate strategies will need to be developed for groups such as adolescents. An adolescent strategy, for instance, must be comprehensive, inter-sectoral and must focus on adolescent-specific issues.

We need to provide quality sexual and reproductive health services with right messages on reproductive choices, particularly to our youth and adolescents. The Guttmacher- Lancet Commission’s 2018 report on sexual and reproductive health and rights acknowledged the gaps in fulfilling the SRHR needs of individuals, communities and economies across the world and the need to adopt a holistic and stigma-free approach on access to SRHR services in order to ensure health and human rights for all. The report recommends nations to expand access to a comprehensive and essential package of SRH interventions, which would include more common components such as contraceptive services, maternal and new born care and treatment of HIV/AIDS. In addition, the package should also include the less common components such as comprehensive sexuality education, safe abortion services, counseling, prevention and awareness regarding cervical cancer and gender-based violence (Starrs et al. 2018). Our population can be turned into an asset rather than a liability if we know the knack of turning it into a productive investment (Starrs et al. 2018).

Therefore, there is a greater need today to step up budget allocations to accommodate the growing contraceptive requirements of the India’s population in the reproductive age group. The family planning budget has remained 4% of the National Health Mission budget since the year 2014–15. Only about 60% of the allocated family planning budgets are utilized. India is a young nation with 53% of the population in the reproductive age group (15 to 49 years). 13% currently married women have an unmet need for family planning; indicating that about 30 million currently married women, who do not want to get pregnant or do not want any more children are not using contraceptives for various reasons. Additionally, the unmet need for family planning stands at 22.2% (approx. 11 million) among young currently married women (15–24 years), who need access to quality family planning services and spacing methods of contraception.

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