Assessment of Healthcare among Tribal People of Dhar District of Madhya Pradesh

This study is confined to Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, covering tribal population in relation to their food security and healthcare. To conduct the study a sample size of 200 was taken, in which 100 of the respondents were working tribal people and rest 100 were non working people. These 200 people from each village were interviewed with the help of schedule and questionnaires developed for collecting the data. It is found from the study, the analysis of health indices of the tribal population in Dhar is worse than the national average; infant mortality rate 84.2, under five mortality rates 126.6, children under weight 55.9, anemia in children 79.8, children with acute respiratory infection 22.4, children with recent diarrhea 21.1, women with anemia 64.9 per 1000. A high incidence of malnutrition has been documented in tribal dominated in tribal dominated districts of Dhar. More than 60% of tribal population of Dhar lives in high – risk areas for malaria. The spleen rate in children between 2 to 9 years was also high in Bhils (25.8%), Bhilalas (35.1%), Patlyas (24.4%) and in Bareliyas (26.3%) tribal population in Dhar. The acute diarrheal problems were basically due to poor environmental hygiene, lack of safe drinking water, improper disposal of human excreta, aggravated by low literacy, socio-economic status coupled with blind cultural belief, lack of access to medical facilities leading to serious public health problem. The distribution of thalassemia trait showed wide range of variations, i.e. from 0% to 8.5% among the major tribes. The distribution of G-6-PD deficiency among 18 major schedule tribes was studied and the enzyme deficiency was quite high, varying from 5.1% to 15.9%. The frequency of deficiency was high in males (range 4.3-17.4%) than in females (range 0.0 -13.6%).