A new report by Save the Children Fund, an international charity organisation, says that over 200 million children under the age of five do not have access to basic health care facilities. A third of these children – 67 million - live in India. The report says that 53 per cent of India’s children lack access to basic health care. Fifty-five developing countries – these account for 60 per cent of the world’s under-5 population and 83 per cent of all child deaths worldwide – were assessed on their life-saving health care facilities for children. India stands 27th, along with Ghana and Eritrea.

The report draws attention to the extreme vulnerability of the girl child in India. It says that Indian girls are 61 per cent more likely than boys to die before they reach the age of five. While India has been able to cut child mortality by 34 per cent since 1990, the survival gap between boys and girls is growing. This is because it is more difficult for a girl child to access health care facilities, on account of discrimination practised against the girl child within families and society. Girls are provided with less nutrition and families are less likely to be willing to spend on their health. Parents take immunisation of the girl child less seriously. The health care systems that the countries were assessed on are neither high-tech nor expensive but pretty basic – pre-natal care, skilled childbirth, immunisation and treatment for diarrhoea and pneumonia. It is shameful that India is unable to provide even this basic health support to its children.

India brags about its super-speciality hospitals and skilled surgeons of world class standard. It is apparently poised to earn roughly $2 billion by 2012 from providing health care to foreigners. Yet it is unable or rather unwilling to save the lives or improve the health of its own children. It is not fancy hospitals or equipment that is urgently required to save our children but improvement in basic infrastructure. Clean drinking water and a functioning sewage system will save the lives of lakhs of children. Sixty years after independence India remains one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. Millions of children are dying of diseases that are treatable. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admits that India’s spending on public health is “seriously lagging behind other developing countries in Asia.” His government should act immediately to correct this. Public health should be given top priority.