India is known as a producer of quality foodgrains having medicinal qualities. Considering this, India should top the list of the healthiest nations. This belief was refuted when it was revealed that an average life expectancy in India is 35 to 40 years, in late 1940s. Polio and infant mortality was rampant, and children between 5 to 10 years of age suffered from it.
Things have changed a great leap after that and today an average Indian life expectancy is 65. The pathos is it took us 66 years to reach this stage and we are even today dealing with issues like epidemics, infant mortality and female foeticide. A major reason for this can be attributed to the regulatory failure. It has been difficult to regulate the private practitioners in terms of transparency in the fees charged, medical audit, accountability and grievance redress.
India is the second most populous country and government finds itself inefficient to provide adequate healthcare facilities to the ever increasing population. Family planning programs are not taken seriously and it is difficult to monitoring an implementation of such programs on such a wide scale. This results into ailing of sector facing insurmountable issues.
India also poses a challenge from the emerging contagious diseases like swine flu and chronic degenerative diseases. Most of the poor sections cannot avail the preventive treatment for such diseases, sometimes due to financial inability and otherwise because of the unawareness of the instruments being in place. Both public and private sectors face different challenges. The public sector has a wider spread as most of the Indian population who lives hand to mouth, cannot afford exorbitantly charged private medical facilities.
Albeit over last few decades, private medical practice has shown a remarkable draw, it has still remained stubbornly urban adopting a commercial purview. Talking about the government instruments to regulate the healthcare sector, it has introduced various commissions, and bodies to monitor fair implementation of the health care policies, however all these commissions and bodies comes under the purview of different regulatory authorities and ministries. Absence of any single regulatory body has been responsible to a great extent to the rampant frauds and mistreatments. Lack of funds in public sector hampers availability of advanced and improved medicines to the rural and most cardinally poor sections of the society. India has a marked shortage of trained nurses. The majority of the skilled trainers take trainings in the private colleges where they get paid enough and the training of the public sector staff lies in danger.
What frets the experts more is the emergence of new diseases. It is believed to be due to lack of environmental sanitation. Defecating in the open, chewing tobacco, spitting on the roads, smoking excessively in the public place, unsafe drinking water, malnutrition paired with accumulated stagnant waters can be the elements, inviting new diseases to the nation.
Having said that, Indian healthcare sector also has some inspiring opportunities impending for it and Improving health care initiatives votes for it.