India yet to achieve global goals in healthcare: Murthy

Though India has made tremendous strides in healthcare sector with increased life expectancy, it has a long way to go to reach the global standards, said Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy today.
Quoting the World Bank reports in a lecture at BioAsia, he said though the infant mortality rate has come down, India missed the "Millennium Development Goals".
"In India Life expectancy in India has increased from just 45 years in 1960 to 67 in 2010. While the progress has been steady, India still lags way behind comparatively with countries including China and Brazil. These are the countries which have invested considerably more in healthcare.

Overall, we must say that India has made considerable progress but we still have long way to go and to catch up with our neighbours and global comparatives," Murthy said.
He said there is huge disparity in terms of performance between South India and North and North eastern states of India.
He also expressed concern over the rise in diseases such as dengue and chikungunya.

"What is somewhat concerning is that we fall behind even our small neighbours like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in public health issues. As per the World Bank report Indian infant mortality rate has decreased by 25 points between 1995 and 2015.

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Giving out statistics, Murthy said India needs to
implement health management system data collection and analysis for early warnings.
"Health management and information system is an area where India currently lags. We need a unified health management information system, the corner stone of efficient public healthcare systems. Implementation of HMIS in India would prove invaluable for improving the data collection predicting disease burden and local health needs and early warning systems," he said.
According to him, India accounts for about 35 per cent of rabies deaths and non-communicable diseases have become key contributors to deaths in India.
"It (non-communicable diseases) accounts for 60 per cent of deaths. Primarily these affect people in productive phase of their life, that is 35th year to 65thyear, and they have huge implications in terms of national productivity," Murthy opined.

He suggested that science and technology can play a key role in diagnosis and management of disease, mass application of drugs, availability of drugs on mass scale and at affordable cost.