Fake Public Health Research

The article, “Designing a Framework for Benefit Packages: Achieving Universal Health Coverage in India” by Shankar Prinja, Atul Sharma, Indrani Gupta, Samik Chowdhury and Mayur Trivedi (EPW, 27 July 2019), marks a new low in the decline of the quality of public health research, which has been occurring since the launch of the ill-fated target-oriented time-bound Family Planning Programme in the mid-1960s. The authors belong to public health units in three prominent institutions at Chandigarh, Delhi and Gandhinagar. It is astonishing that in undertaking the huge public health research task of designing the benefit packages for a big and

complex country like India, they have missed taking into account quintessential public health considerations, such as epidemiological approaches, optimising health service systems, health manpower development, health social sciences, and health service cadres. They themselves have also admitted to many serious limitations in their article. Besides these, there are numerous shortcomings in the conceptualisation of their problem, in defining their study population and their use in defining their designing of framework packages as well as many elementary statistical and non-statistical flaws in data collection.