Report of the Working Group on Health for All by 2000 A.D.

The fundamental objective of the State and its national health plans should be to provide universal primary healthcare and medical services to all sections of society, specifically to those in the tribal, hilly and remote rural areas – the report states.

The Working Group notes that the government’s expenditure on social services decreased from 21 per cent in the First Five-Year Plan (1951 to 1956) to 13 per cent in an outline for the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1980 to 1985). The expenditure on health reduced from five to 1.8 per cent.

The report suggests targets for health indicators for the year 2000. The maternal mortality rate, which was 4.8 per cent in 1976, should be below two per cent in 2000. The life expectancy at birth was 52.6 years for males and 51.6 years for females in 1976, and it should be 64 years for both genders by 2000. The infant mortality rate was 125 deaths per 1,000 births in 1978, and the Working Group states that it should reach below 60 deaths.

The report says that state governments should provide a ‘minimum package’ of health services in the Sixth Five-Year Plan period. The package should include the universal provision of promotive, preventive and basic curative services; the prevention and control of communicable and non-communicable diseases; promoting a plan of food supply to improve nutritional status; special healthcare plans such as family planning programmes; and ‘population education’ to enable people to practise the ‘small family norm’.

According to the report of the Sub-Group on Meaning of Health for All in the Background of India’s Health Needs, the ‘primary health care approach’ is necessary to attain health for all by 2000.

Strengthening the education sector is crucial to achieve health for all by 2000 as education has a direct bearing on efforts to promote health. The report of the Sub-Group on Inter-Sectoral Coordination to Achieve Health for All recommends that health education be included in schools, colleges and universities.

State governments should implement school health programmes to conduct periodic check-ups of children during the Sixth Five-Year Plan period – suggests the Working Group. A scheme covering children who do not attend school should also be drawn up. In addition to providing healthcare to children, such programmes can increase health awareness in the families and social groups that the children belong to.

The Sub-Group on Community Involvement to Achieve Health for All by 2000 A.D observes that the pattern of community involvement in health programmes cannot be uniform throughout the country, depending on the infrastructure available for the programme as well as other factors. The Sub-Group states that there should be at least two community health volunteers in every village, of whom one must be a woman.

The Working Group recommends that central assistance for healthcare schemes go only to those states which ban private practice by government doctors, and in all medical colleges and institutions.

The government should draw up a scheme to translate the basic texts of different traditional systems of medicine in Hindi and English from the languages in which they are available, such as Sanskrit, Arabic and Tamil.

Focus and Factoids by Riya Behl.

PARI Library's health archive project is part of an initiative supported by the Azim Premji University to develop a free-access repository of health-related reports relevant to rural India.