Articles by Santosh Mehrotra

This article offers a menu of options for reform of Uttar Pradesh's public health system. Though some actions have been taken after the introduction of the National Rural Health Mission in late 2005, a large number of very serious problems remain. Unless they are addressed, the monitorable targets of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan in regard to health and nutrition in India will not be met, since UP has such a large weight in the unmet needs of public health in the country.

For nearly two decades, Uttar Pradesh has had a movement to mobilise the dalits and the other backward castes of the state. However, UP's lower castes had, before the mobilisation began, and still have, the worst social indicators in the state and in the country. Earlier in the last century Tamil Nadu also experienced a mobilisation of the dalits and backwards, but managed to transform the social indicators in health, nutrition, fertility and education after independence. Thus, while UP's mobilisers of the dalits have focused exclusively on capturing power, the gains to the lowest castes have been entirely of a symbolic nature. This paper, after analysing the data from two National Family Health Surveys (1992 and 1999), addresses the reasons why UP's social indicators, including the health and education status of the lower castes, are much worse than in Tamil Nadu - despite the lower caste mobilisation over the last decade and a half.

This paper compares human capital theory with the capability approach and lays out the problems with the theory. As a knowledge paradigm for education and development, it finds the theory wanting. However, it has remained the foundation for sectoral work in education and health by international financial institutions. The paper spells out the problems, historically, with World Bank lending in the education sector, some of which follow from human capital theory, while others follow from a broader neoliberal agenda. It concludes by delineating the foundational elements of an alternative knowledge paradigm for ?education for all?, based on the capability approach and its extension.

The problems with the structure of public spending on elementary education are threefold: high share of teacher salaries in recurring expenses, higher fiscal priority accorded to secondary education at the state level, and sustainability, as external funding for DPEP runs out. This paper examines the scope for reform in the pattern of education spending and considers ways to mobilise additional resources for elementary education, including earmarking funds for the same.

Services in Developing Countries Santosh Mehrotra Jan Vandemoortele Enrique Delamonica Not all social sector expenditures play as important a role in supporting economic growth and reducing poverty as basic social services preventive and basic curative health services, water and sanitation, family planning, and basic education. They are not only more efficient in terms of providing 'human capital' but they are also more equitable. Nevertheless, there is little information about what developing country governments spend on these basic services. This paper presents data from six case studies EI Salvador, Guinea, Nepal, Niger, Philippines and Tanzania estimating the level of public spending on basic social services with special emphasis on the need for future work on assessing the possibilities for increasing these expenditures. The relevance to issues in the health and education sector in India is notable.