State of the nation's health

India needs a state-specific, disease-specific approach

Many of the broad findings of a report titled “India: Health of the Nation’s States” published on Tuesday may not have come as a surprise. For a while now, it is known that India has shown an improvement in health care outcomes as it experienced higher economic growth rates and governments, both at the central and state levels, increasingly ran programmes to meet this objective. It is also known that despite the improvement over the past two decades, India remains way behind its neighbours such as China. Also, the overall figures mask the huge state-wide divergence. All these bits of