Essay on the state of Health after Independence in India

A healthy manpower is a great feature of a developing economy as it leads to greater output per man. But the health and under nourishment adversely effect the quality of manpower.

But in UDCs people are underfed and under nourished which results in poor quality of manpower. There is also deficiency of proteins and vitamins in the diet of the people and due to the lack of medical facilities diseases are very common in the people.

The best way to improve the quality of manpower in UDCs is to provide adequate food and better nourishment to people, better sanitary facilities and the extension of medical facilities which in turn will raise the efficiency and the productivity of the people.

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Human capital, is therefore, “needed to staff new and expanding government services to introduce new system of land use and new methods of agriculture, to develop new means of communication, to carry forward industrialisation, and to build the educational system.

In other words innovation or the process of change from static or traditional society requires very large doses of strategic human capital.”

Health Development after Independence Keeping in view the importance of health and nutrition, the government paid full attention to solve all the main problems cited above.

As a result, a number of programmes were started. There is a lot of improvement in the state of health since we started planned economic development in 1951. The Birth Rate has fallen from 39.9 per thousand in 1950-51 to 25.8 in 2000-01.

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Death Rate has fallen from 27.4 per thousand in 1950-51 to 8.5 in 2000-01. Life expectancy has gone up from 32 years in 1950- 51 to 65.3 years in, 2000-01. Infant mortality rate has fallen to 68 per thousand in 2000-01 as a result of success of the maternal and child health component of family welfare programmes.

The number of medical colleges has gone up to 165 in 1998-99 as against 28 in 1950-51; the number of hospitals has increased from 2694 to 15,097 and number of dispensaries from 6,515 to 28,225 during the same period (1951-1999).

There were no community centers in 1951 but in 1999 there were 2,913 community centers. Similarly there was no sub-centre in 1951 but there were 1, 36,379 in 1999. The number of primary health centers has gone up from 725 to 22,446 (28 times increase), the number of hospital beds has gone up from 1, 17,178 in 1950-51 to 8, 70,161 (seven times increase) in 1999.

The number of doctors has gone up from 61,840 to 5, 03,900; of dentists from 3290 to 23,953 and number of nurses from 16,550 to 5, 65,696 during the period 1951-1999.

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In 1999, we had 5.2 doctors for every one lakh population as against 17 doctors in 1951. Although tremendous expansion has taken place in health services even then as compared to advanced countries our position is not that good.