Drawing from an ethnographic study conducted in a Karnataka village, the unfavourable differential treatments against Dalit patients in rural public health services are delineated. An analysis of medical interactions shows that as compared to non-Dalits, Dalit patients experienced more apathy, denial, and avoidance behaviours from service providers. Surprisingly, most Dalits did not attribute this to their caste, but to the flaws of the public health delivery system. Caste and allopathic medical practice are embedded in the rural public health delivery system, and both camouflage and normalise discrimination in paternalistic medical interactions. This sustains the favourable environment for caste-based discrimination in rural public health services even in places where Dalit consciousness is strong.
The Draft National Education Policy, 2019 lacks commitment to the idea of common school and encourages segregation and differentiation of schooling experiences for different socio-economic groups.
The Draft National Education Policy, 2019 is silent on the role of the state in providing equality of opportunity in and through access to school education. It has fallen into the trap of measuring outcomes while remaining indifferent to input shortcomings and systemic inequalities.
Patriarchal structures have ensured that women’s access to resources, health, education, and political representation among other things, have remained heavily unequal.
All authors were formerly at Council of Scientific and Industrial Research HQ, New Delhi. This study looks at the available life-saving treatments for heart attacks and ischaemic heart diseases administered in India, focusing on streptokinase and finding that it is the life-saving clot-buster for the majority of patients. This brings to light that the surgical intervention of angioplasty is more of an income-biased treatment. Public-funded research and development of indigenous streptokinase has directly enabled access to treatment, especially for economically challenged patients.
More than 20 lakh patients of ischaemic heart disease-led myocardial infarction can benefit from a life-saving clot-buster drug in India. At the turn of the century, its availability in India was poor and no domestic production existed until the first Council of Scientific and Industrial Research licensee began production in 2001-02. Its price was less than half that of the drug made by a multinational company, the major supplier in the market at that time. Its supply increased to 1,20,000 doses in 2011 after other producers entered the market. Prices dropped by more than 50%. The economic impact of streptokinase technologies, or the value that would be lost if the licensee's streptokinase did not exist, is about `580 crore for the patients.
If the 1990s marked an intensification of the process of `globalisation', within the policy discourse of the higher education sector that process has manifested itself through the idea of the `international university'. In part, internationalisation implies a redefinition of higher education as a globally marketed commodity or as an export oriented `industry'. These developments are examined by means of an analysis of the internationalisation of Australian education, and the operational procedures, strategies, and expansionist market objectives of Australian higher education institutions in India. It is argued that, under the hegemony of neo-liberal ideology, these international linkages are emerging as a result of the transformation and restructuring of the higher education sector in both nations.
