Saving Mothers Is Not Enough: Jharkhand Must Fix Rural Healthcare
OPINION
By Prof. Anant Kumar
Jharkhand’s Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) is 51, making it one of eight states to meet India’s 2030 target of below 70 deaths, ahead of states like Gujarat and Karnataka. The figure is based on data from the Registrar General of India (RGI), released in May 2025, in the Sample Registration System’s special bulletin on maternal mortality. A state often associated with failures has quietly gotten something right here and deserves recognition.
However, the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly presents a very different picture of the same health system. In December 2025, during the assembly session, Health Minister Irfan Ansari, responding to a question about patients across the state not being treated because there was no one at the health centre to treat them, announced a recruitment drive for 1,277 doctors, one of the largest such drives the state has attempted. The government publicly admitted in its own legislature that a meaningful share of its health facilities lack enough doctors to function.
Jharkhand’s health system cannot be both functional and failing at the same time. A survey of rural health facilities found that many Primary Health Centres were staffed only by auxiliary nurse midwives, while laboratory and pharmacy services were often unavailable due to a lack of technical staff. In Koderma, with over 700 villages, functioning sub-centres fell short of Rural Health Statistics norms, forcing families to travel long distances to under-equipped facilities. A mother in Ranchi and one in a remote Koderma block are technically covered by the same health system, but in reality, they live in two different Jharkhands.
This matters because SDG 3 emphasises overall health and well-being, not merely survival at birth. It is about the continuum of care that follows: a sick child who needs a doctor at two in the morning, an elderly person with diabetes who needs a functioning pharmacy nearby, and a pregnant woman who needs a laboratory to check her haemoglobin before it becomes an emergency.
Jharkhand’s newly released NFHS-6 numbers, compared with the previous round, show slow to moderate progress. Institutional deliveries rose only slightly, from 75.8 to 77.4 per cent, still well below the national figure of 90.6 per cent. The child stunting rate fell from 39.6 to 35.0 per cent, whereas the underweight child rate rose from 39.4 to 41.1 per cent, and diarrhoea among children climbed from 7.2 to 10.3 per cent. Adult health has regressed as well, with high blood sugar nearly doubling among women, from 10.2 to 15.0 per cent, and rising sharply among men, from 14.1 to 21.8 per cent.
Jharkhand has improved on certain indicators, but it has not solved the far larger problem of having enough trained personnel on the ground to handle common illnesses. Without enough doctors and labs in rural areas, a health system can’t track the growth of malnourished children, treat infections, or detect anaemia in pregnant women early.
None of this should detract from what Jharkhand’s maternal mortality numbers represent. Getting mothers through childbirth safely in a state with difficult terrain and poverty is genuinely hard, and the state has done it better than most of the country. The honest conclusion is not that Jharkhand’s health achievements are fake. They are real, uneven, and incomplete, concentrated in areas that received sustained attention, while ordinary, everyday healthcare in the rural interior was allowed to fall behind.
The state’s own recruitment drive for 1,277 doctors is the right instinct and should be closely watched, since Jharkhand has heard such promises before. Filling those posts and retaining doctors, particularly in districts with the thinnest coverage, rather than posting them wherever doctors prefer, would do more for SDG 3 in Jharkhand than any single new scheme announced from Ranchi.
The author is a Professor at Xavier Institute of Social Service, Ranchi. The views expressed are personal.
Email: pandeyanant@hotmail.com
