Healthy India would certainly be a wealthy India with its all round progress. Rounded development of an individual, and consequently of the whole society, depends on his/her total health. The latter could be defined as the enthusiasm to be creative in life to live and let others live with physical, mental, social, emotional, societal, and spiritual wellbeing. The foundation of this kind of growth should be laid in childhood. The parents and the home environment are as important, if not more, than all the education that the child gets in life outside the home. Village schools are the ones that train the bulk of future India. There are well over six lakh villages in India where more than eighty per cent of Indians live. Unless the village school, where the future India is being brought up, is given due respect and importance the country has no future, despite all the fanfare of the Sensex rising and India shining.



Lop sided technological development and economic growth are not as important as the emotional and ethical growth of the populace. While aping the west we should be careful not only to imitate the worst in their culture, we would do well to concentrate on the best that they have. Monetary economic growth alone would eventually take man into the valley of moral nihilism and extremism, as has happened in the west today. Monetary development must be combined with healthy human development, as defined above. We, in India, have had a hoary past of a great culture. Indian culture depended on what every Indian did when no one was observing him/her. Indian culture demanded that we walk our talk. Indian culture, combined with the good points in the western economic growth, would make India the world leader once again. It all depends on India’s greatest asset-its man and woman power.



Even the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. The first step for the growth of a strong India in the next few decades is to change the face of the village primary school. This should be the nucleus for village development, nay the country’s development. The prevailing scenario is anything but conducive to this kind of human growth. The recent PROBE report made very sad reading about the appalling conditions of village schools in the four large northern states of UP, MP, Bihar and Rajasthan. The earlier we do something to change this, the better for the nation. Good life depends on good health to begin with. Health depends on man and his surroundings. Health does not depend on doctors and hospitals. The latter are needed only by those who are not healthy. If we try to preserve and promote positive health, the need for doctors and hospitals would automatically go down.



Education for healthy living:



Educated people, especially those that receive correct guidance to live and let live, have been shown to live longer and better than those that do not have education. Education and health promotion are inseparable parts of human growth. It makes good sense to make the primary school in every village also the village health promotive unit. The present concept of a primary health centre in villages is not only a waste of resources, it is counter productive. The PHCs, as they are conceived now, are fashioned more like mini hospitals without the capacity to do even minor surgery, not to speak of the doctors presence in the first place. Doctors in India today are trained within the four walls of a hi-tech modern hospital where they get to see a microscopic minority of serious terminal illnesses. Such training, which stresses the use of gadgets and scanners for every diagnosis, would be an anathema in a village set up to assess and diagnose illnesses as they present in society. The young doctor, not exposed to this kind of medicine in his medical school, feels like a fish out of water in a village and feels guilty. This is the reason why our doctors do not want to go to villages.



Village school teacher as a health promoter:



In the new concept the village school teacher is trained for a year with a teaching diploma in school health promotion (TDHP) to replace the village doctor. Every medical school could be made to train certain number of selected bright village teachers, free of charge, with a special curriculum to equip them with enough know how to look after the holistic health of the children and their parents in the village. They should be provided with communication facilities to inform the Taluk hospital about any sick child or adult in the village to be shifted there for treatment. They should be trained to spot trouble and inform the doctor and the hospital to do the needful. The money being spent for the PHCs could be diverted to develop this new concept along with the village school. The teacher/health promoter would look after sanitary needs in the village like toilets for every household, clean drinking water, smokeless houses, and clean meals for all, and assist the villagers to live like a large family in the village. In due course people would look up to them for all kinds of guidance. The idea is to develop a cadre of village teacher who becomes the friend, philosopher, and guide of the villagers.



In the school these teachers have added responsibility to see that children get proper nutritious meals, they develop healthy habits, clean dress and are made to wash hands before eating. Children should be trained to use the toilet and teach their parents in turn at home. Children should be taught to respect all life on this planet as we are all inter-dependent. These teachers are responsible to see that children get proper immunization at the right time. They could help children to develop a healthy social outlook with universal compassion, sharing and caring. Healthy living should be one of the important subjects in the curriculum but without the conventional end year examination. However, those who excel should be given a special certificate as also some incentive by way of a prize or so. Children could be encouraged to think for themselves to develop curious healthy citizens for science training in later life. Catch them young should be the motto. My friend, Dr. Solomon Victor, a famous cardiac surgeon of Chennai, has a model for teaching school health. That could be supplemented to make a special curriculum for the subject of health promotion in school, as also expanded to make the curriculum for the teaching diploma mentioned earlier.



Village School as the cultural centre of the village:



Rounded education needs an overall development of human personality. Arts, humanities, behavioural methods, community living etc. could all be promoted through regular festivals in schools periodically where the villagers use local talent to entertain others with the help of the teachers and students of the school. This could be a good medium for spreading health messages like AIDS awareness, family welfare etc, through dance, drama and songs. Folk arts could be promoted here. Creative writing, story telling, poetry reading etc. could be arranged in addition. Neighboring village talents could also be tapped in the bargain. The stress in all these should be communal harmony and community living and letting others live. The school should be the place where all special occasions of all religions should be celebrated to show the oneness of all human beings-the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man. Village school teachers could wear the cap of village counselors in their spare time. For all these one will have to make the village teacher happy with comfortable living standards where he/she does not have to depend on a side business for living. It would be better to tap the best brains with right qualifications for the village teachers job. Bright young men and women should shape the future of India. They would do well in this area rather than in central services or in IITs, where they may do well for themselves. As a village teacher one builds a new India that will be the world leader, not only in monetary terms but in human terms.



Family Welfare and the Village Barber:



Another area where our planning has gone astray is the family welfare. If we are able to control our population we will be able to build better village schools. The village barber is the friend of every male in the village. Males are the usual culprits in the failure of family planning. The barber meets every man at least once a month for about half an hour. Barbers are incessant talkers. Peer pressure is the best influence. If we could train the barber and motivate him to convey the message of family planning in his own rustic terms to every male in the village, I am sure our family planning would be a lot better in future. The village teacher/health promoter could be used to train and give continuing education to the village barber to replenish his knowledge. The credit for this idea should go to a friend of mine, Late Dr. H.K. Ranganath, a noted writer who told me to try this method while I was trying to help develop a few villages with the help of money from a generous patient of mine, Shri Durgadas Mandelia.



School Children to help develop the village atmosphere:



We have been able to get the children in village schools to help grow more trees and also help keep their surroundings clean. They could be the best influence on their parents in following good healthy habits. Children should be given prizes for growing tress and gardens in their own homes instead of giving prizes for mugging g up textbooks! In short, the village school could be the nucleus for the great future for this country. May the future India develop a healthy tradition which could be the model for the whole world? The present school scenario in the west is so bad that our children should not even know what is happening there. There have been eleven thousand serious crimes against teachers in schools in the US in one year and eleven teachers were shot dead by their own students. School children use their parents’ guns to settle daily quarrels with their peers and/or teachers! When one ponders over these facts, one realizes the significance of what is written above.