Equity and Access

Healthcare issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. Both the central and the state governments have responded to criticisms of health care inaccessibility by including it as a part of its developmental policies in the last two decades. Given this context, the contributors to this volume explore how the health care system is structured in India; the role of the state, market, private, and corporate sector in health care; the distribution of basic health care facilities by the state across caste, class, gender, and spatial locations; the implications of increasing clinical trials and use of pharmaceuticals in terms of cost, exclusion, and ethicality; how globalization created opportunities or built hurdles for democratizing health care facilities; and the critical role of communities in the new health care system. This edited volume thus provides a holistic narrative that explains the politics of health care access in terms of distribution, utilization, and outcomes as well as the context in which health inequalities are reproduced which is critical not only to our scholarly understanding of health care but to informing the development of health care policy in India at a critical juncture.