ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Articles by Mohan RaoSubscribe to Mohan Rao

Barriers to Establishing a Dedicated Public Health Cadre

The efforts to develop a public health cadre have not seen much progress in most of the Indian states, despite the recommendations of several committees appointed by the union government, and the 2022 guidelines issued for establishing them. This paper, by drawing on the views of experts in the field, examines the epistemic, structural, systemic, and administrative barriers to the establishment of such a cadre in the south Indian states. It notes that the dominance and perpetuation of biomedical view of health, poor understanding of what public health is, privatisation of healthcare, the vested interests of clinicians, consultancy firms, international funding institutions and the existing hierarchies and binaries within the system, act as major barriers to the establishment of the cadre. The paper suggests that the proposed public health management cadre needs a critical revisit in light of these impediments and concerns.

Maternal Deaths

Childbirth in South Asia: Old Challenges and New Paradoxes edited by Clémence Jullien and Roger Jeffery, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021; pp 342, $75 (hardback).

Two-child Norm

In July 2021, Uttar Pradesh announced a population policy, the draft of the Uttar Pradesh Population (Control, Stabilisation and Welfare) Bill, 2021. While the contents of the bill are contentious, so is the timing of its tabling in the legislature. In terms of substantive population planning, the draft document is not only detrimental to long-term demographic transition, it has serious repercussions for welfare state mechanisms.

 

Why India’s Vaccine Companies Are Profiteering in the Pandemic

The crisis of COVID-19 vaccines in India is a consequence of government policies dating back decades. Private foundations led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have engineered a shift in research and manufacture of essential technologies such as vaccines to private biotech labs and factories. Companies such as the Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech can dictate terms and prices of vaccines developed with public support because the closure of public vaccine manufacturing units over a decade ago has left the government at the mercy of the private sector.

 

Pandemic as Population Check?

As India undergoes massive societal transformations due to the pandemic, a potential dangerous by-product could be a worrying consensus on the need for population control. Dressed as a positive population check to “cure” poverty, such a turn in policy can enable rushed and knee-jerk public opinion that proves fatal for historically persecuted populations. The dangers of support for coercive population control policies in the garb of economic recovery are examined.

Dalit Feminist Voices on Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice

Previous research has addressed questions of reproductive justice and the stratifications of Indian women’s reproductive lives in terms of class position and economic status. However, the question of caste has received little attention in the literature and there has been a lack of research on assisted reproductive technologies and caste along with the absence of Dalit feminists speaking out on reproductive technologies. This paper attempts to begin exploring the significance of caste by drawing on in-depth interviews with Dalit feminists who challenge dominant understandings of surrogacy in both international and national debates on reproductive technologies. It highlights how an insistence on the wider socio-economic context of women’s lives challenges notions of reproductive rights, replacing them by reproductive justice.

 

The ‘Population Bomb’ of the Aged

As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis by Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Harvard University Press, 2018; pp 320 (hardcover), price: unstated.

A Monumental Work for Health Justice

Textbook of Global Health by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Yogan Pillay and Timothy H Holtz, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; pp xxxvi + 674; fourth edition, price not indicated.

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