National health policy 2017: Can it lead to achievement of sustainable development goals?

Abstract

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) benefited through the valuable lessons learned from Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by forwarding the unfinished agenda of MDGs from 2015 onwards. India has also made tremendous improvements during implementations in concurrence with the MDGs, yet lacks in various fields. In 2017 National Health Policy (NHP 2017) was launched by Government of India (GOI) replacing National Health Policy 2002. There is much positive step forward in NHP 2017, but in combination with inadequacies regarding approaches to many key objectives necessary policy corollaries are much needed; otherwise many goals will remain unattainable. This new health policy will help keep improving the maternal and child health but still is unspecific about ‘Health as a fundamental right’ and many burning issues including, the emerging problems of non communicable diseases (NCD), violence on women, sanitation and most importantly ignoring the dire need of long term financial vision of primary health care as well as public health sector in the country.

Keywords

• India
• Health policy
• Achieve
• SDG