Leading a healthy life in UP difficult: Vice-President

7 Jan 2009, 0344 hrs IST, TNN
LUCKNOW: The prospect of living a healthy and long life for the 180 million population of Uttar Pradesh is profoundly disturbing. This is becausethe life expectancy at birth is 56 years in UP as against that of 74 years in Kerala.

This was stated by Vice-President Mohammed Hamid Ansari, while speaking at the fourth convocation of the prestigious 108-year-old Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University (CSMMU), which was earlier known as the King George's Medical College (KGMC), set up in 1905.
The audience was virtually sent into a brooding silence over the issues raised by the vice-president. In the backdrop of prevailing situation, he summed up: "It would thus seem that the state you are born into determines how long you would live." The health of citizens was a component of the globally and nationally accepted parameters of human development. On this count, "UP continues to languish at a low level of human development." This was a fact, the State Planning Commission had also noted, the vice-president pointed out.
Referring to the data produced by the National Family Health
Survey (NFHS) of 2005-06, the vice-president said indeed the picture emerged for UP was very distressing. The findings of the survey are as : Around half the women in the age-group between 15 and 50, and 85% children under 3 years in the state suffer from anaemia; Around half of the children are stunted and underweight; Less than a quarter of children have been completely immunised; Infant mortality in UP is 73 per thousand live birth as compared to the all-India figure of 57.
What was most disturbing, the vice-president said, was that less than 10% households in the state had access to piped drinking water in comparison to the all-India figure of 42% and only 43% of households in UP had electricity as compared to 68% nationwide. Likewise, only 33% in the state had access to toilet facility as compared to 45% India-wide, the vice-president said.
Apart from this, the vice-president said there was a need to bridge the critical gap in order to improve health care in the state. In line with this, he said UP should strive hard to provide better coverage of its population by health care facilities. At present, the population covered by a sub-centre in UP is 7,080 and the average distance is 3.4 kms, while the national average is 5,109 and 1.3 kms respectively. The result is that only 9% of the state's population makes use of government facilities for treatment of ordinary ailments.
While the rest depends on private medical facilities; 11% of the population is just not able to access medicare either by the government or private due to locational disadvantages. In case some of them get it, there is no guarantee of sustained care.
The state of affairs, the vice-president said, had disastrous consequences for the poor. Only 11% of population of UP receives antenatal care compared to 85% in Kerala and only 11.3% are institutional deliveries for UP compared to 96.6% for Kerala.