HEALTH GOALS IN THE FRAMEWORK OF INCLUSIVE GROWTH

Health connects society with population studies. Health is both the cause and consequence of social development. For the first time, the chapter on Health and Family Welfare and AYUSH in the Eleventh Five Year Plan of India, presents time bound goals in a social framework. The goals are:

• Reducing Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) to 1 per 1000 live births.

• Reducing Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) to 28 per 1000 live births.

• Reducing Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to 2.1.

• Providing clean drinking water for all by 2009 and ensuring no slip-backs.

• Reducing malnutrition among children of age group between 0–3 to half its present level.

• Reducing anaemia among women and girls by 50%.

• Raising the sex ratio for age group 0–6 to 935 by 2011–12 and 950 by 2016–17.

The above goals assume that health and family welfare are closely associated with women's place in society. In the patriarchal structure of India women are associated with reproduction. As they have low literacy, low awareness, lower entitlements and low decision making power, they produce more children than they want, suffer from malnutrition and anaemia, and face high maternal mortality caused by home delivery and postpartum hemorrhage. In such a society a girl child is a burden on parents. Therefore, the family forces the pregnant women to go for sex determination test and abort the baby if the baby yet to be born is a female. This results in low sex ratio in the age group 0-6. All these problems will have to be tackled jointly. They cannot be solved in isolation (Figure 2.1).

As said earlier, women's issues are connected with region. In general, the status of women in the southern states (i.e., on the southern side of Vindhyal range of mountains) is better than in the northern states. This divide is reflected well in all the health and demographic parameters. This means that health issues, women's issues and regional issues are to be handled simultaneously.