Impact of Janani Suraksha Yojana on Maternal Health Care in South India

Eminence health issue has become an important pointer of social inclusion. Providing maternal and child health care to the disadvantaged sections of the society has become a defied task before any government, rather than just medical care. The important indicators of health in a country are infant mortality rate, maternal mortality rate and life expectancy at birth. Life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rate, fertility rate, crude birth rate of the rural community are perhaps the best measures of real human development of any nation. The Northern and Southern states exhibit considerable differences. While the North has lower levels of literacy and relatively higher level of agricultural development, the South generally exhibits higher literacy levels and better health facilities. The Southern states (India) have lower levels of infant, child and female mortality rates and lower fertility rates. Jagged delivery of modern medical facilities, lack of operative prevention measure, health behavior, lack of strong political will, poor medical infrastructure, malnutrition, transport system, peoples ignorance, nutrition, housing, sanitation, safe drinking water, social infrastructure, health and medical care services provided by Government, geographical climate, employment status, and incidence of poverty are some of the hurdles in reducing infant and maternal mortality in India. This book is based on the report of the research project sponsored by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). This book will be useful to the university faculty members, students, NGOs and the policy makers.

Dr. D.C. Nanjunda is currently an Associate Faculty with Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy Research Centre, Mysore University, India. He has done Ph.D. in Anthropology form Mysore. He is the author of over Eight dozen of research papers including few edited and authored books. He is having few years of research experience in various public health issues. He is a member of the editorial board of few professional journals. He has been awarded few prestigious fellowships to his credit. His research areas includes Applied and Clinical Sociology, Development Anthropology, Public Health, Rural and Tribal Issues and Policy Studies.

"All systems of medical belief of practice are empirically self confirming. People everywhere live until than finally die and they only die once, while in the process of living they undergo various, physical and mental disease or illness episodes. In brief, a lot of people will recover from their health problems no matter what the healers they met, say or do, and they will mostly would like to give credit to their recovery to what was done" (Leslie, 1986: 79).

In 1998, the World Health Assembly made new commitments to 'Health for All Policy for the 21st century. The commitment included in part: "We commit ourselves to strengthening. adapting and reforming as appropriate our health systems including essential public health functions and services in order to ensure universal access to health services that are based on scientific evidence of good quality and within affordable limits, and that are sustainable for the future. We will continue to develop health systems to respond to the current and anticipated health conditions, socio-economic circumstances and the needs of people, communities and countries concerned to appropriately manage public and private actions, and investments in health" (WHO.1998).

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