A Parliamentary Committee on the empowerment of women on August 8 tabled a report in the House, which pulled up the Union government for not having disaggregated data on the health conditions of tribal populations in the country and called for extensive data collection in this regard.
The panel also called for a review in the Allocation of Business Rules so that the Tribal Affairs Ministry can be empowered to appropriately plan resources for tribal welfare in sectors like health, education, nutrition, skill development and livelihood.
The committee, headed by BJP MP Heena Gavit, painted a grim picture of the health conditions of tribal women in the country with whatever data was made available to it by the government from various sources.
In the report on health facilities for tribal women, the committee noted how several diseases like sickle cell anaemia and leprosy continued to be more prevalent in tribal populations.
Poor health
In a written note to the committee, the Health Ministry stated that genetic conditions like sickle cell disease and G-6 PD deficiency are rising in tribal areas and that hypertension prevalence was also high in these areas, in addition to a higher prevalence of communicable diseases like leprosy, tuberculosis, cholera, etc. compared to other social groups.
More than half of all tribal women in the reproductive age group are anaemic, the panel noted. It added that sickle cell disease testing of around 1.5 crore tribal people in targeted districts had shown 10.5 lakh people to be carriers, with around 50,000 diagnosed with the ailment.
“The committee fails to understand how the Ministries have so far evolved policies or are going to chalk out any action plan to secure maternal and infant health among the tribals without having proper maternal mortality ratio data,” it said.
The panel had prepared its report based on interactions with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and the Ministry of Women and Child Development — none of which had specifically disaggregated data on the health conditions of tribal women.
The Tribal Affairs Ministry submitted to the committee that it has already started working on creating a central database for monitoring the health of tribal people. For this, it said it had declared the Piramal Swasthya, a non-profit organisation, as a centre of excellence, which had started accumulating some disaggregated data for 117 tribal districts.
The committee, in its recommendations, asked that the government take out the sub-sample of tribal populations from the National Family Health Survey-5, and periodically examine the data being centrally collected through the centre of excellence’s work.
“It is a fact that despite having better sex ratio of 990 as compared to India’s average of 930, child marriage, early motherhood, low body mass index, and high incidence of anaemia are causing high rates of mortality among tribal women,” the committee said.
On the need for greater power to the Tribal Affairs Ministry to design customised policies for tribespeople, the committee said that the current Allocation of Business Rules allow the Ministry to plan and monitor overall implementation of the Tribal subplan but it leaves the power to make sectoral policies in health or education with the respective Ministries.
“The committee feels that there is a need to review the Allocation of Business Rules with reference to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs with a view to empowering the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in such a way that substantial funds are made available to them for making area specific, sector specific, and group specific schemes, especially in the sectors of livelihood, education, skill development, nutrition and health,” it said.
The government also informed the committee that in order to address anaemia among tribal populations, the AYUSH Ministry had conducted some pilot studies in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, where Ayurvedic medicines had purportedly “shown tremendous improvement”. It added that it is planning to expand these studies to other parts of the country as well.
Further, the Union government said that it was setting up an online portal for the registration of tribal people with sickle cell disease or sickle cell trait so that targeted interventions in the form of awareness campaigns and access to testing can be ensured.
However, the committee said it failed to see the relevance of making tribespeople self-register on online portals given that they might not have access to mobiles, computers and the Internet, or the knowhow to operate these devices. The panel thus recommended that self-help kiosks be placed at block-level to facilitate registration.
In addition to this, the committee also analysed government policies to address issues of prenatal and post-natal care of tribal women, improving their access to health care facilities and emergency services, including for mental health conditions.
