Communities cannot thrive without good health, but sadly, good health can be elusive for communities on the margins of society. Even before covid, tribal and indigenous people all over the world have routinely experienced lower life expectancies, poor maternal and child health, and higher rates of both infectious and non-communicable diseases.
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The coronavirus pandemic—food insecurity, isolation, and loss of income that have followed—have only exacerbated these trends and pushed vulnerable tribal and indigenous populations further to the margins.
But India is particularly well placed to reverse these trends. As home to 28% of the world’s tribal people, developing holistic bottom-up strategies to improve health and well-being in local settings. India can become the forerunner of new initiatives to improve tribal health, creating a model for the rest of the world to empower indigenous communities.
By working with local leaders to bridge knowledge gaps, strengthening last mile service delivery and leveraging the potential of new technologies and partnerships, India can vastly improve the well-being of its 104 million tribal citizens and help the world reach its Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
To be clear, this task will not be easy. Due to a variety of factors, the life expectancy of tribal and indigenous people worldwide is up to 20 years lower than the rest of the population. More than half of indigenous adults over 35 suffer from type-2 diabetes.
In India, while there is limited data, sources suggest that a tribal woman is twice as likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth. India’s tribal population also accounts for 50% of malaria deaths in the country, and tuberculosis is five times more prevalent.
Nonetheless, India has both the ability and responsibility to transform how its most vulnerable citizens and communities receive healthcare. Doing so is critical not only to India’s future, but to that of tribal and indigenous populations all over the world.
The challenge of improving tribal health and nutrition can be tackled with a three-pronged approach. First, there must be enough available knowledge and tribal de-segregated data to make evidence-based policy decisions. Complicated problems cannot be solved without an in-depth understanding of the root causes.
India is not a homogenous population; linguistic barriers, coupled with generally poor or no data, might further lead to a lack of context-specific policies and interventions. Thus, it becomes imperative to create and disseminate knowledge around tribal health and nutrition, both to inform policy and help address myths within communities that might discourage people from accessing healthcare if and when available.
Second, working alongside governments at every level, we must strengthen health service delivery in the last mile. While universal access to healthcare has remained elusive to date, the government is making its best attempts to bridge the gap with tribal focused plans, including by operationalizing health and wellness centres in remote and tribal areas.
In past, be it in the aspirational districts of India or working in other parts of the world, affordable and accessible healthcare does not become a reality unless both the delivery of health services and health-seeking behaviour of the community work towards each other. In other words, to achieve the audacious goal of impacting 104 million people, both the demand and supply sides of health services will have to be bolstered in parallel.
Finally, leveraging new technologies and partnerships can improve both decision-making and patient care. New digital innovations, especially mobile apps and platforms, can connect people longitudinally, vertically, and horizontally.
Introducing point-of-care devices can improve data collection and accountability throughout the health services sector. The national digital health mission is an important step in the right direction and can help expedite this digital transformation.
Similarly, bringing together multiple partners around the shared vision of improving tribal health can focus efforts for positive change. Several philanthropic organizations (including the Piramal Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and civic groups working in the tribal health space have recently come together to create the Tribal Health Collaborative.
This unique and exciting initiative has set an ambitious goal of ending all preventable diseases among India’s tribal communities in the next decade. If successful, it will improve the lives of 100 million of India’s most marginalized citizens and save more than 5 million lives from disease.
Through data, delivery, innovation, and partnership—guided by a spirit of sewa, or selfless service—we can help reduce the burdens of disease, malnutrition, and poor health for millions of people in India and around the world.
Creating robust knowledge infrastructure could enhance policymaking, effective implementation at the last mile can ensure the optimal use of healthcare services, and new technology platforms could help knit these aspects together and close the tribal health and nutrition loop.
This tripartite model of knowledge, implementation, and technology can help us realize our collective goal of a more equitable society. If we commit ourselves to it and invest now in improving tribal health and nutrition, we can make a world of difference to those in need.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.