The Government of India has initiated many beneficiary programs for the under-privileged in the society. Under the National Rural health Mission (NRHM), many programs were commenced with the idea of conditional cash transfer (CCT). For example, the Janani Surksha Yojana was started to promote institutional delivery, Family Planning Promotion was started to combat overpopulation, female foeticide and illiteracy. There exist many other such state level programs. Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. AID volunteers at the Pehal took the initiative to promote family planning amongst the daily wage laborers. While passing through the phase of pre-counseling, many were hesitant in adopting such methods and some were convinced that a baby’s birth was God’s will. However, upon being told about the compensation which would be provided by the Government of India, many couples were ready to go against God’s will. We visited many nearby private and public hospitals having family planning programs. We learnt that the government has stopped providing funds to these hospitals for family planning compensation. In addition, the number of sterilization cases has decreased significantly within the previous months. Suddenly, the question that struck my mind is that is the public adopting family planning initiatives merely for some bucks or are they really interested in having a small, healthy and happy family? These programs or schemes are time bound till there is a change in mindset. Till then, the government needs to continuously provide the compensatory money in order to achieve its optimal health indicators and combat this menace.
April 5, 2010 at 11:23 AM
@Till then, the government needs to continuously provide the compensatory money in order to achieve its optimal health indicators and combat this menace.
- Well, in case of family planning govt has been providing this for long time, and that's one of the reasons it's backfired. It's not the monetary incentive that's needed, but there's more need for the awareness generation. If you study the mass sterilization during 70s you will understand there have been a lot of issues and today also there are people who are scared of govt's FP programs. Again, awareness can only be achieved with increase in literacy rate (primarily in women).
Family planning, has always been govt's pet project, and draws major chunk of the health budget too. Whenever there's a complain about health programs not working out, the advises have been to reduce the budget, but when it's family planning, the advice is always to increase the budget :-)