Problems of three high focus Northeastern states after five years of decentralised planning in India

Introduction National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) was launched to address with a mission approach all components of functional systems; infrastructure, human resources, logistics and participation of the community through increasing government investment in healthcare and addressing managerial weaknesses in the system. Before the launch of NRHM, in order to bring the states that were performing poorly in terms of health indicators at par with the better performing states, the empowered action group of eight states was constituted in 2001. The failure to achieve desirable improvement in health indicators led the NRHM to focus on 18 poorly performing states, which included eight northeastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim. Our consultancy organisation got an opportunity to be part of the decentralised planning process in three high focus northeastern states of Meghalaya (2006-2007), Tripura (2006-2007) and Sikkim (2007-2008) under NRHM. After five year’s journey of NRHM, this study aims at revisiting the situation in the light of the performance of these three states in three identified components of structural correction of the health system.