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Unlock This CourseIn the lesson Making Rural Living Sustainable you looked at soil, air, water and crop yields in rural India. Clean water and healthy soil matter, but people also need good health care, a steady income and a safe home. This lesson covers those three, using rural India again as our developing country example.
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Many rural villages in India are a long way from a hospital. Rural people can struggle to reach a doctor, especially in an emergency or during the monsoon, when roads flood.
Build health centres and clinics inside rural areas, so people travel less. Train local women as ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists), village health workers who advise on pregnancy, vaccination and hygiene, and who help families reach a clinic. Mobile clinics and phone advice can reach remote villages.
Better care means fewer deaths in childbirth and fewer children dying of illnesses that can be treated. Healthy adults can work and farm. But clinics need trained staff, medicines and electricity, and doctors often prefer to work in cities.
Farm work is seasonal. Between harvests many rural families have little work, and this pushes young people to move to cities, as you saw in the lesson Hazards and Rural-Urban Migration. Strategies aim to give people more jobs where they live.
The Indian government runs a rural jobs guarantee scheme that offers every rural household a set number of days of paid work a year, often building ponds, roads and water works. Training in skills such as tailoring or repairing machines lets people earn outside farming. Self-help groups, where women save together and lend to each other, help them start small businesses. Food processing and diversification, covered earlier in this topic, also add jobs.
A steady wage helps families buy food, pay school costs and save. It can slow migration to cities. But the scheme guarantees only a limited number of days, wages are low, and small businesses need customers and loans.
In Hiware Bazar, the village in Maharashtra from the last lesson, better water meant farmers could grow more, and more work stayed in the village instead of people leaving to find jobs.
Many poorer rural families live in homes made of mud, thatch or other weak materials. These can be damaged by monsoon rain and floods, and they often have no toilet or clean cooking fuel.
The government housing scheme for rural areas (Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Gramin) helps poor families build solid brick homes with a toilet and a safe place to cook. Families often build the home themselves, which also creates local building work.
A strong house is safer in storms and floods, and a toilet and a safe place to cook protect health. But money is limited, so not every family can be helped at once, and building materials and land can be hard to get in remote villages.
The spec asks you to use socio-economic data to show that quality of life has improved. Compare the numbers from before and after a strategy. The table below is invented, to show you how.
| Indicator (invented village) | 2010 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| Households living in a brick home (%) | 35 | 70 |
| Births in a health centre (%) | 40 | 85 |
| Adults in paid work all year (%) | 45 | 62 |
| Average household income per month (rupees) | 6,000 | 11,000 |
Adults in paid work all year rose from 45% to 62%. The change is 62 - 45 = 17 percentage points. Income rose by 11,000 - 6,000 = 5,000 rupees. As a percentage of the starting figure: 5,000 ÷ 6,000 × 100 = 83% (to the nearest whole number). Always quote both the start and end figures, and say what the change means: more regular work and more money means families can afford better food, health care and schooling.
One village does not prove a whole country has improved, and data cannot show everything, such as whether people feel safe. Good answers use more than one indicator and say so.
(a) Give one strategy that has been used to improve health in a rural environment you have studied. [1 mark]
(b) In a village, the number of births in a health centre rose from 40% to 85%. Calculate the change. [1 mark]
(c) Explain how this data, and one other type of socio-economic data, could show that quality of life has improved. [4 marks]
(a) Training ASHA village health workers, or building a clinic in a rural area. (1)
(b) 85 - 40 = 45 percentage points. (1)
(c) More births in a health centre (40% to 85%) means more mothers and babies get trained care, so fewer die and quality of life improves. (2) Another indicator is income. If average household income rises from 6,000 to 11,000 rupees a month, families can afford more food, schooling and medicine, so quality of life has improved. (2)
When a question gives you data, quote the figures and say what the change means for people's lives. That earns the second mark.