National Population Policy 2000 highlights

It reiterated the government’s resolve to push for voluntary and informed choice and agreeability of citizens to get maximum benefit from reproductive health services.

It embarks on a policy outline for the government for next ten years to improve the reproductive and child health needs of people of India which include issues like child survival, maternal health, contraception, etc.

School education upto age of 14, to be made free and mandatory. This will also include plan to check drop-out rate of boys and girls.

The policy also aims at curbing the IMR to less than 30 per 1000 live births.

The Maternal Mortality Rate will also be brought down to less than 100 per 1, 00,000 live births. A high MMR is a symbol of economic and social disparity of the fairer sex. It also points to heightened inequities in terms of healthcare and nutrition.

Another important feature of the policy is to attain universal immunisation of all children against preventable diseases.

The policy will also act against child marriage and promote 20 years as the right marriageable age for girls. The legal age for same is 18 years.

The policy will actively support a target of 80% institutional deliveries and 100 % deliveries by trained persons.

It also seeks to achieve 100 % registration of births, deaths, marriages and pregnancies.

Preventing and controlling all communicable diseases.

It will also strive to Integrate Indian Systems of Medicine to provide reproductive and child health services by reaching out to households.

It thus will seek to integrate and converge all related social sector programmes so that complete family welfare and health can be taken care of and properly maintained.

NPP 2000 also emphasizes the role of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddh and Homeopathy (AYUSH) medicine system to serve the goals of public health.

Government of India launchedthe National Population Policy in 2000 to improve quality of lives of people of India and to provide them with equal opportunities to be productive individual of society.