An Oxfam report Serve the Essentials released today, highlighting lack of access to education, health, water and sanitation, called on all South Asian governments to step up their financial and political commitments to provide these essential services.

“Without strong government participation there will be no development of essential services,” said Ben Philips, Oxfam’s acting regional director. “There is a lack of investment and political will.”

Economist Jean Dreze, writing the foreword to the report, has asked for “free and universal” delivery of essential services like primary education and healthcare. This view is controversial as the government has been moving towards targeting and rationalising public services in India. “It is certainly import to reaffirm the notion that ensuring universal access to essential services is a social responsibility...” argues Dreze.

The report is especially critical of India's inability to supply adequate medical services, saying it was causing millions of unnecessary deaths, particularly infant and maternal mortality. “Every half an hour six nameless Indian women die in childbirth,” said the report’s author, Swati Narayan, noting that only 40 per cent of rural clinics have labour rooms. The relatively high costs of medicine for the poor also deterred many from seeking medical treatment.

Other problems in India were identified as 70 per cent of the population lacking access to toilets, 170 million people with no clean drinking water and a primary school dropout rate of 38 per cent, according to Oxfam and UN figures. “There has been an utter failure in our systems to deliver services,”acknowledged Planning Commission member Saida Hameed, adding that health problems were exacerbated by a severe gender bias in India. “A girl in India is up to 50 per cent more likely to die before her fifth birthday than her brother,” she said.

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