Technocentric Approach to Health- Western Response to Alma Ata

Technocentric Approach to Health Western Response to Alma Ata Debabar Banerji DISCUSSING limitations of technology in the context of health of children in the third world, the editorial comment in the Economic and Political Weekly (May 17, 1986) has rightly brought into focus the larger issue of the role of public health technologies and emphasised that health improvements brought about by immunisation, use of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT), growth charts or nutrition supplements can only be sustained by the availability of food, water and shelter and the political and economic power of the people to obtain them. It has also rightly emphasised that these technologies are being used by the ruling class in third world countries to achieve visible and dramatic improvements in health and to divert attention away from the lack of basic survival needs. These observations are important because they open up the wider questions of motivations behind these efforts to impose technocentric approaches to deal with the problems of child health in the third world, when it is well known that these problems are rooted in the ecological conditions prevailing in these countries[l].