Launch a national Tribal health mission

The health of the Tribal in India is in a dismal state. On the occasion of International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, let us explore the need of a tribal health mission to bring revolution for the tribal people of India.

Health status of Tribals in India

• Tribal people are concentrated in 809 blocks in India. Such areas are designated as the Scheduled Areas.
• Half of India’s tribal population, nearly five and a half crore, live outside the Scheduled Areas, as a scattered and marginalised minority.
• They are the most powerless.
• The health status of tribal people has certainly improved during the last 25 years as seen in the decline in the under-five child mortality rate from 135 in 1988 in the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-1 to 57 in 2014 (NFHS-4).
• However, the percentage of excess of under-five morality among STs compared to others has widened.

What threatens the health and survival of tribal adults?

• Child malnutrition is 50% higher in tribal children: 42% compared to 28% in others.
• Malaria and tuberculosis are three to 11 times more common among the tribal people.
• Though the tribal people constitute only 8.6% of the national population, half of the total malaria deaths in India occur among them.
• While malnutrition, malaria and mortality continue to plague tribal people, gradually, the more difficult to treat non-communicable diseases such as hypertension and diabetes, and worse, mental health problems such as depression and addiction leading to cancer and suicide are increasing.

Challenges

• Lack of health facilities: Tribal people heavily depend on government-run public health care institutions; there is a 27% to 40% deficit in the number of such facilities, and 33% to 84% deficit in medical doctors in tribal areas.

• Lack of involvement: There is hardly any participation of the tribal people – locally or at the State or national level – in designing, planning or delivering health care to them.
• Lack of data: There is hardly any segregated national data on tribal health.

Required measures

• Health plan: Launch a National Tribal Health Action Plan to bring the status of health and healthcare at par with the respective State averages in the next 10 years.
• Address gap in health sector: Address 10 priority health problems, the health care gap, the human resource gap and the governance problems.
• Adequate funding: Allocation of additional money so that the per capita government health expenditure on tribal people becomes equal to the stated goal of the National Health Policy (2017), i.e., 2.5% of the per capita GDP.
• Mission mode implementation: The Health Minister and the 10 States with a sizable tribal population should take the initiative.