B ox Access to safe water and sanitation to all by . Reduction of occupational injury by half from current levels of per lakh agricultural workers by . Increase State sector health spending to > % of their budget by . Decrease in proportion of households facing catastrophic health expenditure from the current levels by % by .
Ensure availability of paramedics and doctors as per Indian Public Health Standard (IPHS) norm in high priority districts by . Increase community health volunteers to population ratio as per IPHS norm, in high priority districts by . Establish primary and secondary care facility as per norms in high priority districts (population as well as time to reach norms) by . Ensure district–level electronic database of information on health system components by .
about population and health issues. Over the past half-century or so, India has many significant achievements to her credit in the field of population, as summarised in Box . . The Family Planning Programme suffered a setback during the years of the National Emergency ( – ).
Normal parliamentary and legal procedures were suspended during this time and special laws and ordinances issued directly by the government (without being passed by Parliament) were in force. During this time the government tried to intensify the effort to bring down the growth rate of population by introducing a coercive programme of mass sterilisation. Here sterilisation refers to medical procedures like vasectomy (for men) and tubectomy (for women) which prevent conception and childbirth. Vast numbers of mostly poor and powerless people were forcibly sterilised and there was massive pressure on lower level government officials (like school teachers or office workers) to bring people for sterilisation in the camps that were organised for this purpose.
There was widespread popular opposition to this programme, and the new government elected after the Emergency abandoned it. The National Family Planning Programme was renamed as the National Family Welfare Programme after the Emergency, and coercive methods were no longer used. The programme now has a broad-based set of socio-demographic objectives. A new set of guidelines were formulated as part of the National Population Policy of the year .
In , Government of India came out with National Health Policy in which most of these socio–demographic goals were incorporated with new targets (Box . ). Read these policy goals and discuss their implications in the class. The history of India’s National Family Welfare Programme teaches us that while the state can do a lot to try and create the conditions for demographic change, most demographic variables (specially those related to human fertility) are ultimately matters of economic, social and cultural change.