IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jdevst/v56y2020i5p907-928.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Flies without Borders: Lessons from Chennai on Improving India’s Municipal Public Health Services

Author

Listed:
  • Monica Das Gupta
  • Rajib Dasgupta
  • P. Kugananthan
  • Vijayendra Rao
  • T. V. Somanathan
  • K. N. Tewari

Abstract

India’s cities face key challenges to improving public health outcomes. First, unequally distributed public resources create insanitary conditions, especially in slums – threatening everyone’s health, as suggested by poor child growth even amongst the wealthiest. Second, devolving services to elected bodies works poorly for highly technical services like public health. Third, services are highly fragmented. This paper examines the differences in the organisation and management of municipal services in Chennai and Delhi, two cities with sharply contrasting health indicators. Chennai mitigates these challenges by retaining professional management of service delivery and actively serving vulnerable populations − while services in Delhi are quite constrained. Management and institutional issues have received inadequate attention in the public health literature on developing countries, and the policy lessons from Chennai have wide relevance.

Suggested Citation

  • Monica Das Gupta & Rajib Dasgupta & P. Kugananthan & Vijayendra Rao & T. V. Somanathan & K. N. Tewari, 2020. "Flies without Borders: Lessons from Chennai on Improving India’s Municipal Public Health Services," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 56(5), pages 907-928, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:56:y:2020:i:5:p:907-928
    DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2019.1605053
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2019.1605053
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00220388.2019.1605053?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ziming Zhou & Yumeng Jiang & Haitao Wu & Fan Jiang & Zhiming Yu, 2022. "The Age of Mobility: Can Equalization of Public Health Services Alleviate the Poverty of Migrant Workers?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(20), pages 1-18, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jdevst:v:56:y:2020:i:5:p:907-928. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FJDS20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.