Procurement for health

In a country of India’s size, procurement for health is necessarily a vast undertaking requiring transparent management of large sums and efficient delivery of much-needed goods.

To overcome these challenges the Government of India selected UNOPS to procure goods for its health sector programmes with funding from the Governments of India and the United Kingdom, the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), and the World Bank. In this capacity INPC manages an annual budget of more than $100 million.

UNOPS established its India Procurement Office in May 2007. Since then, the Office has issued more than 30 tenders for medical equipment and drugs to combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

UNOPS support has already produced significant results for the Government. For example, INPC successfully mitigated a potential crisis in the national immunization programme due to a shortage of syringes by using an emergency procurement procedure to acquire the needed equipment in a record 30 days and at normal prices despite the urgency of the requirement.

Project management

Despite strong economic growth in India since the early 1990s much of Indian society nevertheless confronts poverty and associated health problems. Children continue to die from vaccine-preventable diseases such as polio and measles. The widespread lack of adequate sanitation facilities makes diarrhoea the second leading cause of death of children under five years of age. Malnutrition affects almost half of all those under five.

Against this backdrop the Governments of India and Norway launched the Norway India Partnership Initiative in September 2006 to help achieve United Nations Millennium Development Goal 4, which seeks a two-thirds reduction in global mortality rate of children under five.

Operating from 2007 to 2011, the Initiative is facilitating rapid scale-up of high quality, equitable and sustainable child-related health services in five states that account for 40 per cent of India’s population and almost 60 per cent of child deaths: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

Best practices and lessons learned during implementation will provide benchmarks that can be applied elsewhere in the world.

UNOPS serves as an implementing partner, together with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO). In this role INPC has launched an Initiative Secretariat and established national and state implementation mechanisms.

INPC also serves as the local fund agent, contracting implementing agencies to carry out NIPI activities and holding, disbursing, monitoring and reporting on use of Initiative funds.