Health Disparities in India: Conceptual and Empirical Explorations


Book Description

This book is an attempt for understanding the recent researches in health disparity study. This compendium volume is the outcome of the proceedings of the UGC sponsored seminar on the concerned theme being held at Sitalkuchi College in January 2016. The resource persons, academicians, the research scholars have contributed their research findings in this compendium volume. Hope this book would fulfill our desire to spread the knowledge in the need of other researchers in the domain of Public health.




Indian Health Landscapes Under Globalization


Book Description

This volume brings together a varied array of perspectives on contemporary health and health care in India. Since Independence, in spite of reduced budget, India has been able to achieve a notable improvement in the life expectancy of the population. After the recent liberalization of the economy. Whether the government can safeguard the autonomy of public health, promote efficiency and escape the invariable commodification of health services is the question this very timely volume raises. French and Indian geographers, sociologists, economists, lawyers, make use of a global perspective to introduce the outcome of the process of globalization in the field of Indian health systems in this volume. This systematic examination of cost and benefits seems a good indicator of the level of integration of a rapidly developing country. The authors have clearly stated their preferences, but the comparative studies will enable the reader to obtain a balanced point of view. Finally, working within the field of health, viewed as a key component of the state and society mutations under globalization processes, allowed the authors to demonstrate its risks, as well as its advantages through vital case studies. The major changes can only take place when the global and the national interact in the same direction, otherwise the indigenisation of global process will get subsumed under societal flux.




Medical Tourism and Inequity in India


Book Description

In Medical Tourism and Inequity in India, Kristen Smith explores Indian private hospitals and their role in the global healthcare service supply chain within various religious, social, cultural, historical, and economic contexts. Drawing on critical medical anthropology theories as well as health and human rights perspectives, Smith problematizes the assumed independence between the medical tourism industry, the commodification of the Indian healthcare system, and the local populations facing critical health issues, while highlighting the rapid transformation of healthcare services into merely another global commodity. For more information, check out A Conversation with Kristen Smith, author of Medical Tourism and Inequity in India: The Hyper-Commodification of Healthcare




Governing India's Metropolises


Book Description

This book is a comparative, sector-based study of the changing character of governance in Indian metropolises in the 2000s. Highlighting the horizontal and vertical ties of the participatory groups, both state and non-state, it looks at key civic issues.




The Politics of the Poor in Contemporary India


Book Description

Based on diverse sorts of data and fieldwork in India, this book analyses how the poor participate in a democracy.







Geographies of Health, Disease and Well-being


Book Description

This book is a collection of papers reflecting the latest advances in geographic research on health, disease, and well-being. It spans a wide range of topics, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies - including anti-racism, post-colonialism, spatial statistics, spatiotemporal modeling, political ecology, and social network analysis. Health issues in various regions of the world are addressed by interdisciplinary authors, who include scholars from epidemiology, medicine, public health, demography, and community studies. The book covers the major themes in this field such as health inequalities; environmental health; spatial analysis and modeling of disease; health care provision, access, and utilization; health and wellbeing; and global/transnational health and health issues in the global south. There is also a specially commissioned book review in addition to the chapters included in these six sections. Together, these chapters show cogently how geographic perspectives and methods can contribute in significant ways to advancing our understanding of the complex interactions between social and physical environments and health behaviors and outcomes. This book was published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.




Who Cares?


Book Description

The recent global pandemic highlighted the crucial role played by (mostly female) care workers in providing health services across the world. At the same time, it exposed the deep vulnerabilities and precarities of their lives—abysmally low wages, long working hours, social prejudice, notorious undervaluation—at the hands of an uncaring and exploitative economic system. The editors of this volume identify this as ‘care extractivism’, a strategy that enables the simultaneous extraction and undervaluation of care work, something in which governments and societies are both complicit. Further, they point to the impact of liberalization and professionalization on the political economy of nursing wherein the market principle of cost efficiency leads to informalization, contract labour and hierarchization of nursing in both private and public hospitals. The contributors to this important and timely book draw attention to the varied histories of health care work in India and of Indian nurses abroad. They look also at the recent struggles through which workers have tried to improve their working conditions and which represent a silver lining as they imbibe the potential to disrupt the chain of undervaluation, cost cutting, and poor quality healthcare.




Politics of Precarity


Book Description

Politics of Precarity presents an analysis of contemporary labour politics that emerges with informalization and privatization of crucial social sectors, and in this case one of the few feminized occupations—the nursing sector. Contrary to common understanding, nursing service is not a homogenous sector, but a deeply splintered one based on historically and socially produced structural inequalities and is rigidly cleaved along the lines of ‘prestigious’ and ‘dirty’ work. The levels of classification in this sector are reflected in and constituted by material realities, such as wages, terms of employment, extent of skills, and possession of qualifications. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in hospitals and nursing homes in the city of Kolkata, the book is an ethnographic study that analyses how hierarchies at workplace intersect with social identities to produce a differentiated workforce. The book interrogates the politics of distinction and distancing that produces a feminine workforce divided by class, caste, and sexualities to examine the various contestations among ranks of workers who deploy modernity, morality, and gendered norms as strategies to secure marginal gains at the expense of others.




Global Health Governance and Commercialisation of Public Health in India


Book Description

Global health governance has been the subject of wide scholarship, more recently brought to the fore by priorities for global health defined by the Sustainable Development Agenda. The health landscape itself has changed dramatically in the last two decades, shaped by cross-border flows of capital, ideas, technology intermediated through the complex interaction between global, national and local actors and institutions. This book analyses the complex terrain of global health governance and local responses to new global forms of integration and fragmentation in India. It unpacks, both conceptually and empirically, local manifestation and translation of global health architecture and regimes and how these processes influence public health policy and practice; as well as to what extent rules and flows are complied with, resisted and transformed at national and sub-national levels. Drawing together critical scholarship on interactions between global and local actors, focusing on processes, dilemmas, conflicts and trade-offs that such engagement presents for national health policies and health systems, it speaks to this interface between the global, national and local. Filling an important gap in global health governance scholarship in India, the book is a useful contribution to the fields of global health policy, international health and development, health systems, health inequalities, public health, public administration, development studies, social work, nursing, management studies and mainstream social science disciplines that engage with globalisation and health.