Uttar Pradesh Health Minister Sidharth Nath Singh on Wednesday defended his government over the dilapidated health facilities in Uttar Pradesh and attributed the latest report of the NITI Aayog’s Health Index showing UP at the bottom of the list to the failure of the previous government in the state.
The minister claimed that the NITI Aayog report was of 2017 when the Yogi Adityanath government had assumed power.
“We have inherited a dilapidated health system from the previous government which did nothing. But after we came to power, things have started improving,” he said here.
The minister, however, said that health was a vast sector and it would take some time to improve and the difference was becoming visible to the common man.
He likened the scenario to planting of a mango seed which takes at least four years to become a tree and bear fruits.
“The main improvement in the health system is directly attached to sanitation and UP has achieved a distinction in becoming the top state in the country to construct toilets,” the minister claimed.
Singh also said that the state government had already achieved a big success in controlling Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES) and Japanese Encephalitis (JE) with the mortality rate dropping by 67 per cent during the past two years.
On Tuesday, the NITI Aayog’s had released its Health Index report titled ‘Healthy States, Progressive India’, on various indicators like child mortality rates, sex ratios at birth, immunisation rates, proportion of people living with HIV/AIDS, notification of tuberculosis and health care facilities.
The reference years for most indicators are 2017 or 2018 and the base years to gauge improvement are between one and three years before the reference year. The report was prepared in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the World Bank.
The ranking was done in three categories — larger states, smaller states and Union territories. Among the larger states, Kerala, with a score of 74.01, Andhra Pradesh (65.13), Maharashtra (63.99), Gujarat (63.52) and Punjab (63.01) were the best in overall performance, while Uttarakhand (40.2), Madhya Pradesh (38.39), Odisha (35.97), Bihar (32.11) and Uttar Pradesh (28.61) were the worst.
However, in terms of incremental performance in index scores from the base year to reference year, the top three ranked states are Haryana (up 6.55 points), Rajasthan (up 6.3 points) and Jharkhand (up 5.99 points). Bihar (down 6.35 points) and Uttar Pradesh (down 5.08 points) registered the biggest decrease.
The report attributed the decline in the overall Health Index score of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha between the base year and the reference year to the deterioration of performances of several indicators.
According to rural health statistics data, there was a shortage of 1,288 medical professionals at the primary health centre (PHC) level in Uttar Pradesh as of March 31, 2015. At the community health centre (CHC) level, the state was 2,608 doctors short. As per the report, UP has only one doctor for every 19,000 people. According to the World Health Organisation, there should be one doctor for every thousand people.
In UP, there are 78,476 doctors while the number of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani and Siddha Healing) doctors in the state is 89,756. As per the standards, the state should have at least 2.5 lakh doctors for its population of approximately 23 crore.
