Access of the Rural Poor to Primary Healthcare in India

Shreekant Iyengar and Ravindra H. Dholakia

No WP2011-05-03, IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department

Abstract: The 11th Five-Year Plan of India emphasizes the wider and better coverage of services, such as primary healthcare for the majority of population. For this purpose, various healthcare related programmes have aimed at the vulnerable sections of the society traditionally using social criteria like SC and ST populations. Although they are found to have marginally worse health outcomes than the national average, they are far better than the one’s for the poor on economic criteria. The present paper examines the coverage of basic primary healthcare services among the BPL population in rural areas of six states in India to provide a direct empirical evidence. The results of the survey showed that the coverage of primary healthcare services, such as antenatal care, institutional deliveries, and immunization was very low among the BPL population. The focus of the programme for improving coverage of primary healthcare services should be on the BPL population. If it is done, it would result also in the improvement of coverage among the SC/ST population. Merely focusing on the SC/ST population will, however, leave the poorest of the poor ignored and unattended.

Date: 2011-05-24
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iim:iimawp:10666

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().