As India races against time to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 to reduce Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) to 28 by year-end, the Indian Council for Medical Research is going to conduct a study on the steps taken so far to improve health of children in tribal areas.
The tribal community lags behind the national average on several vital public health indicators, with women and children being the most vulnerable.
“The study comes amid concerns that although infant mortality rate and child mortality rates have declined substantially over the years, the rates are still very high among tribal children. The widespread poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, absence of safe drinking water and sanitary conditions, poor maternal and child health services, ineffective coverage of national health and nutritional services are the major contributing factors for dismal health in tribal communities,” said a scientist from ICMR, a health research wing of the Union Health Ministry.
About 635 tribal groups and subgroups including 75 primitive tribes live across the States.
Although the government has been time to time focusing on ensuring better health facilities by ensuring to set up health care facilities in tribal areas, quality healthcare is not available to the majority of tribal people. Primary Health Centres (PHCs) is to be ensured for every 20,000 population and sub-centres for every 3,000 population.
However, lot remains to be done. For instance, posts of doctors and paramedicals are often vacant. Further, there are issues of non-availability of essential drugs and equipment, inadequate infrastructure, difficult terrain and constraints of distance and time besides poor or lack of transport and communication facilities which makes the healthcare delivery inaccessible.
Moreover, research has shown that 75 per cent of India’s tribal population defecates in the open and 33 per cent does not have access to a clean source of drinking water, taking a toll on their health.
India’s MDG 4 target is to reduce IMR by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, i.e., from 80 infant deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to ‘28’ by 2015. Under MDG 4, another target is to improve the proportion of one-year-old children immunized against measles from 42 per cent in 1992-1993 to 100 per cent by the end of 2015.