Report of the Health Officer, Corporation of Madras Health Department.

  • Madras (India). Health Department.
Date:
[1915]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Health Officer, Corporation of Madras Health Department. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/202
    PREFACE, The President of the Madras Corporation is also its Chief Executive Officer ; his nominal activities are multifarious, and comprise a certain superintend¬ ence of, or responsibility for, all work done on the Corporation’s initiative and at its cost. The major portion of such work may be classified under the heads of a Finance, (fr) Engineering, (c) Medicine ; and it is obviously impossible that any one person should possess the technical knowledge requisite to write a coherent report of what has been done under these heads in twelve months of the life of a large City. Partial recognition of this impossibility has secured for us in the Health Department a real report written by an officer conversant with the details of his business. The difference between the reports of Captain Russell or Dr. Macdonald and the official “ Report of the President” is obvious : the former collate and draw inferences from facts ; the latter, compiled by many hands is merely, a bald and, I fear, somewhat uninforming paraphrase of statistical tables. In what follows I wish to record the impressions gathered during some twelve months’ experience of the working of the Municipality. For this attempt I have been somewhat peculiarly fortunate, the just fates recompensing my failure to keep the town clean with the enforced leisure of typhoid, and ample opportu¬ nity for meditation on my own shortcomings. 2. To my mind before the Corporation can advance it must set its machinery in order. Its zeal for the good of the citizen may be taken for granted ; its pro¬ jects of drainage, water-supply, infectious diseases hospitals, education, are high sounding and beneficent. But when promise is contrasted with performance, I fear that to the disinterested observer Madras somewhat resembles one that walketh in silk attire and lacketh bread. 3. The first need of the Corporation is a financial programme thought out sufficiently in advance. At present a budget is prepared by the executive and submitted to a special meeting of the Commissioners. A wandering and arid debate usually results in such budget being passed as it stands. That criticism is frequently sterile cannot be imputed as a fault to the Commissioners; in a public meeting it is practically impossible to pull a complicated balance sheet to pieces, and to get the figures together again in such a manner that incomings balance outgoings. * 4. It is most desirable that the Corporation as a body should exercise a check upon the financial vagaries of the executive. But the present method of control is to my mind entirely faulty ; attempting to do too much the Commis¬ sioners as a body end by doing nothing. 5. At present all transactions (save those concerned with repair of roads) involving any considerable expenditure of money come before the General Body at its monthly meetings. Control thus exercised is illusory ; at a meeting which