World Health Day

World Health Day

The World Health Day is celebrated by the people all across the world every year on 7^th of April under the leadership of World Health Organization to draw the mass people attention towards the importance of global health. World Health Assembly was held first time in the year 1948 in Geneva by the WHO where it was decided to celebrate the World Health Day annually on 7^th of April. It was first celebrated worldwide in the year 1950 as the World Health Day. Varieties of events related to the particular theme are organized on the international and national level by the WHO.

It is an annual event being celebrated for years to raise the common public awareness towards the health issues and concerns. A particular theme is chosen to run the celebration and take care of the health for whole year. Global Polio Eradication was also one of the special themes of the year 1995 of world health day. From then, most of the countries have become free of this fatal disease whereas in other parts of the world its awareness level has increased.

World Health Day targets all the health issues on global basis for which several programs are organized yearly by the WHO and other related health organizations at various places like schools, colleges and other crowd places. It is celebrated to remember the establishment of the World health Organization as well as draw the attention of people towards the major health issues in the world. WHO is a vast health organization working under UN for addressing the health issues on a global basis. Since its establishment it has addressed serious health issues including chickenpox, polio, smallpox, TB, leprosy and etc from various developing countries. It has played a significant role aiming to make the world a healthy world. It has all the statistics about global health reports.

How World Health Day is Celebrated

World Health Day is celebrated worldwide by the government, non-government, NGOs including various health organizations at many places by organizing programmes relating to the public health issues and awareness. Participated organizations highlight their activities and supports through the media reports by means of press releases, news and etc. Health authorities from different country take part in the celebration with their pledges in order to support on the health issues worldwide.

Varieties of activities are done in the conference of health workers to encourage people to maintain their health in the presence of media coverage. Debates on the related topics, art exhibitions, essay writing, competitions and award ceremony are organized to fulfill the aim of world health day.

Why World Health Day is Celebrated

World Health Day celebration focuses on increasing the life expectancy by adding good health to the lives of people and promoting healthier living habits. Youths of the new era are also targeted by this event to prevent and make them healthy to make the world healthy and free from AIDS and HIV.

Disease spreading vectors like mosquitoes (malaria, dengue fever, filaria, chikungunya, yellow fever and etc), ticks, bugs, sand flies, snails and etc are also spotlighted by the WHO to make the world free from a wide range of diseases caused by parasites and pathogens. It provides better prevention and cure from the vector-borne diseases spread by vectors and travelers from one country to other. WHO supports various health authorities on global basis to make their own efforts for the public health problems to enhance better life without any diseases.

Some of the objectives of why it is being celebrated yearly are listed below:

• To increase the public awareness of various causes and prevention of high blood pressure.
• To provide detail knowledge of getting prevented from various diseases and their complications.
• To encourage most vulnerable group of people to frequently check their blood pressure and follow medications from the professionals.
• To promote self care among people.
• To motivate the worldwide health authorities to make their own efforts in creating the healthy environments in their country.
• To protect families living in the disease vulnerable areas.
• To teach travelers and send them a messages about how to get protected from the vector-borne diseases while travelling.

Themes:

The theme of World Health Day 2016 was “Diabetes:Scale up prevention, strengthen care, and enhance surveillance”.

The theme of World Health Day 2017 is “Depression: Let’s talk”.

Birth anniversary of Babu Jagjivan Ram

Babu Jagjivan Ram, a Union Minister, freedom fighter and Dalit leader, was born on 5 April 1908 in Chandwa village, present-day Bhojpur district of Bihar to a Dalit family. His father, Shobhi Ram, was in the British army but later resigned, bought farmland in Chandwa, and settled there.

Jagjivan Ram was sent to the village school but soon after, his father died. His mother, Vasanti Devi, however, made sure that his education continued. 

In 1922 when he joined Arrah Town School, he realised that discrimination against Dalits was still rife. He protested against the school’s shocking decision to have separate pitchers of water for so-called ‘untouchable’ students.

Later, a meeting with the renowned nationalist leader Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, who had come to visit the school, inspired him.

He went on to study at the prestigious Banaras Hindu University (BHU), and later secured a B.Sc. degree from the Calcutta University. Caste discrimination was unfortunately prevalent in those days in BHU as well. In 2007, when Jagjivan Ram’s daughter Meira Kumar, the then Union Minister for social justice and empowerment, was invited to speak about her father’s days at the BHU — during the inauguration of the Babu Jagjivan Ram Chair — she said that he was even denied haircuts by local barbers.

Political rise

Jagjivan Ram’s successful organisation of a workers’ rally in Calcutta brought him to the attention of leaders like Subhas Chandra Bose. In 1934 Jagjivan Ram was involved with relief work in the aftermath of the Bihar earthquake. In 1935 he was nominated to the Bihar Council. He decided to join the Congress.

  

His first wife died in 1933. Two years later, he married Indrani Devi, the daughter of a Kanpur-based social worker.

Jagjivan Ram was jailed during the Quit India Movement in the 1940s. A year before Independence he became a minister in the provisional union cabinet. Subsequently he was labour minister in independent India’s first union cabinet under Jawaharlal Nehru.  

He later held other cabinet posts such as communications and transport & railways in the Nehru regime.

After Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, he held several important posts in successive cabinets led by her, including minister for labour, employment, and rehabilitation; minister for food and agriculture; and minister of defence. It was during his tenure as agricultural minister that the Green Revolution took place. India defeated Pakistan in the 1971 war when he was the defence minister.

The renowned agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan, who worked closely with Jagjivan Ram, wrote in The Hindu in February 2008: “Babuji [Jagjivan Ram] was deeply concerned with issues of social inclusion in access to new technologies….[He] felt that small and marginal farmers might not be able to purchase the new seeds and the fertilisers needed for enabling them to realise the full genetic potential for yield of the new strains. Therefore, he initiated the Small and Marginal Farmers and Landless Labour Programmes in order to provide the needed credit and inputs to those who would have otherwise been bypassed by new technologies.”

Babuji’s legacy

In 1977 shortly after Indira Gandhi announced elections, signalling an end to the emergency, Jagjivan Ram, together with a few other politicians, became part of the Janata coalition by forming the Congress for Democracy.

As the historian Ramachandra Guha writes in India After Gandhi: “[Jagjivan] Ram was a lifelong Congressman, a prominent minister in Nehru’s and Indira Gandhi’s Cabinets and — most crucially — the acknowledged leader of the Scheduled Castes. . . . It was [Jagjivan] Ram who had moved the resolution in the Lok Sabha endorsing the emergency. His resignation came as a shock to the Congress, and as a harbinger of things to come. For Babuji was renowned for his political acumen; that he chose to leave the Congress was widely taken as a sign that this ship was, if not yet sinking, then leaking very badly indeed.”

Between March 1977 and August 1979, Jagjivan Ram was the Deputy Prime Minister in India’s first non-Congress government. But he didn’t get the country’s top job. “There is little doubt that Babuji provided the fatal blow to the Emergency regime. Not surprisingly, he was the frontrunner to the prime minister’s post,” Ajay Bose wrote in the Outlook magazine in May 2010. “But he was thwarted at the last moment by a powerful lobby led by peasant patriarch Charan Singh. . . .” 

By the time Jagjivan Ram died (on 6 July 1986), the political fortunes of another powerful Dalit leader — Kanshi Ram — were on the rise. But Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party sought to, at least in its initial years, distance itself from the legacy of the tallest Dalit leader of the Congress.

As a dedicated Congress member for most of his life and by virtue of the important ministerial posts he held, Babu Jagjivan Ram occupies a unique position in the arc of Dalit political mobilisation that spreads from Ambedkar to Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. But to look at Jagjivan Ram only through a caste lens would be a disservice to his memory and achievements.