Social services in Himachal Pradesh
Over the last 40 years the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has witnessed much improvement in public health facilities.[citation needed]
Hospitals
In 1989, there were around 899 public health institutions, including state hospital, twelve district hospitals, 189 primary health centres, besides mainstream "Western" and
post-graduate
teaching facilities in some branches.small pox has been eradicated. The Tuberculosis control programme has been a great success. People have taken a keen interest in the family planning programme. One of its interesting feature is that women have outnumbered men in its acceptance.[1]
Education
In 1948 the state had only 200
Palampur and Solan
, respectively.
Water supply
Over-exploitation of natural resources and dumping of hazardous wastes further aggravates the problem. Being unhygienic, it results to pollution and can spread diseases like hill dysentery. Since villages are sparsely populated and distantly located, the arrangement of drinking water
leads to the problem of high costs.
In 1948, except 4 towns, no other habitation in the state had piped water supply. By 1989, drinking water through pipes was made available in about 15,000 villages covering about 75% of the state population. Now alternate sources -underground water has been tapped through handpumps. Under ARWSP, the following norms are being adopted for providing drinking water to rural population in the habitations :
40 litres per capita per day of safe drinking water for human beings.
30 litres per capita per day additional for cattle in the desert development programme areas.
One hand pump or stand post for every 250 persons.
The water source should exist within 1.6 km in the plains and within 100 metres elevation in the hilly areas.
[Water is defined as safe if it is free from biological contamination (cholera, typhoid, etc.) and chemical contamination (excess arsenic, fluoride, salinity, iron, nitrates, etc.)]
Habitations which have a safe drinking water source point (either private or public) within 1.6 km in plains and 100 metre in hill areas but the capacity of the system ranges between 10 lpcd to 40 lpcd, are categorized as partially covered and those having less than 10 litres per capita per day are categorized as not covered.
All the 16807 census villages have been provided with drinking water facilities. An ambitious project, under the Bharat Nirman Yojna, more than 40107 habitations are fully covered March 2006 and remaining 5260 partially covered habitations to be provided drinking water facility by March 2007.
References
http://ddws.gov.in/habquery/main_menu.asp http://mohfw.nic.in/NRHM/State%20Files/hp.htm#hp