The Health Officers were young men who had undergone the same initial training as the teachers and been selected for special courses in hygiene and related subjects for the last two years. Their job was vague. It included some specific tasks, vaccination and inoculation for example, and the giving of injections when necessary. In fact some of them, so I was told, charged illegally for these services. It also included supervision of sanitary arrangements, latrines for example, the destruction of superfluous dogs, and general health education. But they had neither efficient repressive sanctions to back them up in enforcing irksome regulations, nor the slightest training in, or equipment for, persuasion and propaganda. A young man with seventeen villages to attend to had little hope of achieving anything; indeed it was impossible for him to know where or how to begin.
The main health need from the village point of view is immediate and cheap relief from illness, both chronic and short term. We ourselves faced an incessant demand for medical help, to meet which we could do very little. But a Health Officer -who was not even permitted to carry aspirins, and who could do nothing about illness, was completely disregarded by the village. The only Health Officer I knew personally appeared to me to do in fact almost nothing at all, and to be acutely unhappy about his ineffectiveness.