Vaccination Drive among Tribalcommunities

(Judicial Quest News Service)

Under Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) vaccines including Hepatitis B are provided free of cost across the country including tribal areas.

“Public Health and Hospital” being a state subject, the primary responsibility of improving the accessibility of health services for tribal communities is that of respective State/UT government.

However, National Health Mission (NHM) supports the efforts of the State/UT governments to provide accessible, affordable and quality healthcare to all including tribal communities. Under NHM, tribal areas are given certain relaxed norms as under

1. Relaxed norms for health facilities: Against the population norms of 5,000, 30,000, and 1,20,000 for setting up of Sub Centre, PHC and CHC respectively, in tribal and desert areas it is 3,000, 20,000 and 80,000 respectively.
2. A new norm of “time to care” has also been adopted for setting up Sub Health centres in tribal areas under which a Sub Health centre can be set up within 30 minutes of walk from habitation
3. States have been provided with the flexibility of relaxing the norm of one ASHA per 1000 population to one ASHA per habitation in Tribal/hilly and difficult areas.
4. While other States had Mobile Medical Units per 10 lakh populations subject to capping of 5 MMUs per district, in tribal and hilly states, this norm could be further relaxed as per need. Recently, the norms for MMU have been revised to have additional MMU wherever it exceeds 60patients per day in plain areas and 30 patients per day in tribal/hilly areas.
5. In addition, all tribal majority districts whose composite health index is below the State average, have been identified as High Priority Districts (HPDs). These districts receive higher per capita funding, and are encouraged to adopt innovative approaches to address their peculiar health challenges.

In addition to routine immunization sessions, special drives like Mission Indradhanush, Intensified Mission Indradhanush, Gram SwarajAbhiyaan (GSA), Extended Gram SwarajAbhiyaan(eGSA) have been conducted to reach out to left out and hard to reach childrenwhich includes the underserved and hard to reach populations dwelling in forested and tribal areas.

The Minister of State (Health and Family Welfare), Shri Ashwini Kumar Choubey stated this in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha here today.