President Pratibha Devisingh Patil has called for scaling up of global efforts to improve maternal and child health and achieving of MDGs in this regard. Speaking at the inauguration of the conference of The Partnership for maternal, newborn and child health, Patil endorsed the UN Secretary General’s call for coordinated efforts in this direction.

She said the Global Strategy unveiled in September this year at the UN General Assembly is correct and exhorts all of us to change rhetoric into actions. She said health needs a quality infrastructure but the biggest driver of health is education. Efforts in the direction of improving access to education such as right to education and Sakhar Bharat coupled with improved investment in health will lead to much better results in future, she said.

Speaking on the occasion, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that India has demonstrated its commitment by allocating an outlay of 150 million dollars for the micro plans to address critical gaps of infrastructures, supplies and training-human resources for next year alone. “ I believe India is the first country to have such costed plan aimed to achieve MDG 4&5” the Minister said.

The Minister also highlighted the significance of the ‘Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health’ as it has renewed the efforts and focus on MDGs. Multiple set of factors, such as poverty, low social development, weak health systems, non availability of required health personnel, poor infrastructure are challenges that need to be addressed urgently by making substantial investments- both human and financial, the Minister added.

In her speech, World Health Organization's  director general Margaret Chan stressed the need for credible verifiable data on various health parameters. She said that for this harmonized monitoring and reporting standards are of critical standards as ‘we must know what we are measuring and where do we stand’. She lauded India’s efforts for bringing down polio cases by 95 per cent and praised the level of political commitment for health related initiative.