Imphal, March 22 2010: The State Government is devising a new measure to check some pregnant women taking undue advantage of National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) by registering themselves at two/three different places.

There are reports that some pregnant women have been registering themselves at different places with the help of relatives or friends in order to get multiple benefits from the NRHM launched since 2005, said a reliable source.

However, the authority was unable to check this guileful practice all these years.

To check such fraudulence, a name based information tracking system would be launched.

Under this system, each pregnant woman would be given a unique identification number at the time of registration.

Moreover, each and every pregnant woman would be asked to give telephone number for communication.

Related information like whether they (pregnant women) have taken up precautionary measures needed at different phases of pregnancy would be asked through these telephone numbers from time to time.

Maternal death audit (or pregnancy related death) should be conducted under NRHM if there are cases of death during delivery in hospitals.

However, no maternal death audit was conducted all these years.

The NRHM stipulates that an audit team comprising of a CMO as chairman and a senior doctor as a nodal officer should conduct maternal death audit and find out why and under what circumstances a pregnant woman died if there is any such case.

After establishing the definite causes for the death of a pregnant woman, the audit team should recommend due precautionary measures so as to avoid similar cases of death in future.

Though the guidelines of the NRHM envisaged bridging the gap between health care providers and people of remote areas, the mission has achieved little success in Manipur in this regard due to the topography of the State, informed the source.

According to the NRHM guidelines, one Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) should be appointed for every 1000 people.

This guideline is inapplicable in hill areas of Manipur as villages in hill areas have population of only around 200 or 300.If the same guideline is followed, then one ASHA must cover four/five villages which extend to more than 10 Kms.

This has resulted in a serious problem as the number of ASHAs required for hill villages far outnumbers the number of posts sanctioned by the Government.

As per the guidelines, there should be one Primary Health Sub-Centre (PHSC) for every 3000 people.

This implies that villagers located far away from the PHSC are unable to enjoy any health care facility from the same PHSC.

As the population based guidelines has proved quite ineffective, the State Govt is planning to send a proposal to the Centre to modify the guidelines and base it on area, added the source.

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