_page-0001.jpg)
What's the article about?
- It talks about the government's recent decision to exclude disability-related questions from the NFHS-6.
Relevance:
- GS2: Welfare Schemes for Vulnerable Sections of the population by the Centre and States and the Performance of these Schemes; Mechanisms, Laws, Institutions and Bodies constituted for the Protection and Betterment of these Vulnerable Sections;
- Prelims
Context:
- The government has decided to drop questions related to disability in the National Family Health Survey-6 scheduled to start on July 1.
- The decision has dismayed many disability rights activists, who say it would be a lost opportunity to get disaggregated disability data that could guide policies.
What is the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)?
- The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) is a large-scale, multi-round survey conducted in a representative sample of households throughout India.
- The survey provides state and national information for India on: fertility, infant and child mortality, the practice of family planning, maternal and child health, reproductive health, nutrition, anemia, utilization, quality of health and family planning services.
- Its objectives includes:
- To provide essential data on health and family welfare needed by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and other agencies for policy and programme purposes,
- To provide information on important emerging health and family welfare issues.
- International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) Mumbai is the nodal agency responsible for providing coordination and technical guidance for the survey.
- IIPS collaborates with a number of Field Organizations (FO) for survey implementation.
- The funding for different rounds of NFHS has been provided by USAID, DFID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, UNFPA, and MOHFW, GOI.
- NFHS conducted till now:
- NFHS-1 (1992-93)
- NFHS-2 (1998-99)
- NFHS-3 (2005-2006)
- NFHS-4 (2014-2015)
- NFHS-5 (2019- 2021)
When questions related to disability are included in the National Family Health Survey?
- In the NFHS-5 (2019-21), for the first time, questions related to disability were included.
What is the government's justification for the exclusion of disability questions from the upcoming NFHS-6?
- The Ministry of Health and Family stated that disabilities-related questions were already asked as part of the Sample Registration Survey (SRS) 76th round, conducted between July and December 2018, and that any specific information can be tabulated from the raw data, which is also available in the public domain.
- It has also stated that disability data will ‘not change fast’.
- A principal investigator for the survey explained that questions on disability did not give accurate data.
Analysis:
- Huge data:
- While gross data on disabilities will change marginally (but still be substantial given the numbers), the count of 6.1 lakh sample households that the NFHS relies on will make the data set truly representative.
- NFHS is more elaborate:
- The elaborate questions asked by NFHS will provide valuable specifics on the lives of the disabled; something on that scale hitherto conspicuous by its absence.
- Against principles:
- It stated that the decision to remove disability-related questions from its survey was contradicting the principle of “leave no one behind” under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 and added that even the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require disaggregated disability data.
- India is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and SDGs which emphasise the need for governments to collect statistical and research data to formulate and implement policies.
Way Forward:
- The significance of data in influencing policy constructs is uncontested. Given the huge share of disabled people in the population, there must be a comprehensive policy to collect data regarding them.
