The Impact of India's Health Sector on the Development of the World

Introduction
Endeavors of India for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in a time bound and
well-defined manner is very crucial for the development of the country as well as for that of the
entire world (Amin, 2015). The contribution of India’s development in the health sector would
contribute to the development of the world’s overall health due to the mammoth sized population
of the country and the widely ranged inequalities in the socioeconomic and demographic
indicators across India (Agénor, Krieger, Austin, Haneuse & Gottlieb, 2014). The human
development index of India is very much lower as compared to other countries like Russia,
China, Brazil despite being listed among one of the largest evolving economies in the past years.
India has been the largest contributor to the under-five deaths on a global scale since the decades
of 19070s (Amin, 2015).
The annual count of death of under-five children in India was recorded to be as high 1.2
million in the years few past years (Country Income Groups (World Bank Classification), 2017).
This was accounted to be more than 6 times greater than the records of the largest populated
country in the world, China (Denno, Hoopes & Chandra-Mouli, 2015). India has been one of the
top countries where almost seventy-five percent of the one billion people who are extremely poor
live in the world (Dhana, Luchters, Moore, Lafort, Roy, Scorgie & Chersich, 2014). The head
count for poverty rate at the country level was extremely high which also accounted as to be 21.9
percent in the year 2012 (Agénor et al., 2014). This country also happens to have extensive
hunger rate which ranks the country to be at the 97th position among 118 developing nations
included in the Global Hunger Index (Darroch, 2016). India is very likely to achieve the
universal access to reproductive and sexual health care services by the year 2030 as the country
has been taking health goals for its population very seriously which is imminent from the
measures that the country is taking (Country Income Groups (World Bank Classification), 2017).
Measures for the development and maintenance of health in India
Measures for the development and maintenance of health in India relates to the ancient
history of the country (Germain, Sen, Garcia-Moreno & Shankar, 2015). The country, which is
the birth place of Ayurveda that is considered to be the ancient health souvenir, is taking steps
regarding development and maintenance of health through various approaches of primary health
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care in the modern time (Grainger, Gorter, Okal & Bellows, 2014). India happens to be a
signatory to the declarations that were laid down at the ICPD which stated the objective of
achieving the optimum Reproductive Health for All (Squires & Anderson, 2015). This has made
India to devise and implement a lot of approaches and inputs for the development and delivery of
health care along with the manual assistance in regards to the health care (Kim, Goldenberg,
Duff, Nguyen Gibson & Shannon, 2015). Significant developments have been observed in the
sexual and reproductive health care services which integrate the health growth in the aspects of
family planning, education and information associated with health, and the integration of
reproductive health into national programs and strategies (Katz, McDowell, Green, Jahan,
Johnson & Chen, 2015). It can be relevant from the fact that India has successfully obtained
halting and averting HIV. India is also close to achieving the goal of eradicating the under-five
mortality rate (Denno, Hoopes & Chandra-Mouli, 2015).
India has been very seriously implementing the SDG with very well devised ads systematic
efforts, mostly at the local level of the country (UNFPA India, 2017). India has inculcated the
vision of “No one is to be left behind” which denotes to the fact that the country has an
overarching goal for reduction of inequalities across class, gender, caste, and region (Dhana et
al., 2014). It is a fact that the improvements in the health care system are not up to the desired
results, however, the fact that the developments in the provision of good and enhanced overall
health services cannot be denied. Moreover, a great extent of inequalities and disparities has been
existing in various groups of population in the country (Squires & Anderson, 2015).
Historical factors
The concern and experience in the development in health and the primary care in health
in India ages back to the Vedic period (Nath, 2017). The evidence of well-developed and
maintained programs of environmental sanitation laid the underground drains and public baths.
“Health” or “Arogya “ was accounted as high priority aspects in the regular life and such
concept included mental, socials, spiritual and physical well-being (Darroch, 2016).
The lifestyle was very much favorable for the promotion of health and in the daily
activities of regular life called the “Dina Charya” the following necessities of health care were
focused: personal habits and hygiene, health education, dietary practices, exercise, sanitation,
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environmental sanitation, food, self-discipline and code of conduct (Germain et al., 2015). The
political changes such as the onslaught of sequential foreign regimes and aggression lead to the
extinction of the great era of health (Nair, Baltag, Bose, Boschi-Pinto, Lambrechts, & Mathai,
2015). India is a country where the geography is frequently affected by cyclones, floods, and
earthquakes.
In such natural calamities, the health of the people, mostly the section of people belonging
to the poorer sections gets affected (Pachauri, 2017). Through all such past events, the present
governments of the country have been taking the health goals of the country with utmost priority
and have been devising many approaches to provide enhanced health care to the people
belonging poor and underprivileged sections of the country (IDR, 2017).
Cultural factors:
The cultural factors in India have played a very dominating role in the health aspects of the
country, especially in the aspects of sexual and reproductive health. The family planning has
been greatly affected by the cultural aspects (Squires & Anderson, 2015). In many regions and
culture, using contraceptives and condoms in regards to having proper family planning was
considered as taboo in the past (Grainger et al., 2014).
In the cases of diagnosis, there has been an element of controversy even now in the under-
developed regions which have poor literacy rate (UNFPA India, 2017). Uneducated people in
the country are mostly unaware of the knowledge regarding biomedicine. The government is still
working to spread awareness regarding the benefits of using biomedicine (Agénor et al., 2014).
Structural factors:
The structural factors that have the greatest influence on health issues in India are the rules,
regulations, and control from the local, national, regional and institutional and international
organizations (Kim et al., 2015). Further factors that have significant implications on the issues
of health include control over capital, corporations that are associated with the health industry,
measures of control over the orientation of society including economic, political, cultural,
ideology and social aspects (Country Income Groups (World Bank Classification), 2017).
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