IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/3787.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public health in India : an overview

Author

Listed:
  • Das Gupta, Monica

Abstract

Public health services, which reduce a population's exposure to disease through such measures as sanitation and vector control, are an essential part of a country's development infrastructure. In the industrial world and East Asia, systematic public health efforts raised labor productivity and life expectancies well before modern curative technologies became widely available, and helped set the stage for rapid economic growth and poverty reduction. The enormous business and other costs of the breakdown of these services are illustrated by the current global epidemic of avian flu, emanating from poor poultry-keeping practices in a few Chinese villages. For various reasons, mostly of political economy, public funds for health services in India have been focused largely on medical services, and public health services have been neglected. This is reflected in a virtual absence of modern public health regulations and of systematic planning and delivery of public health services. Various organizational issues also militate against the rational deployment of personnel and funds for disease control. There is strong capacity for dealing with outbreaks when they occur, but not to prevent them from occurring. Impressive capacity also exists for conducting intensive campaigns, but not for sustaining these gains on a continuing basis after the campaign. This is illustrated by the near eradication of malaria through highly organized efforts in the 1950s, and its resurgence when attention shifted to other priorities such as family planning. This paper reviews the fundamental obstacles to effective disease control in India and indicates new policy thrusts that can help overcome these obstacles.

Suggested Citation

  • Das Gupta, Monica, 2005. "Public health in India : an overview," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3787, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:3787
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2005/12/02/000016406_20051202162921/Rendered/PDF/wps3787.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Das Gupta, Monica & Khaleghian, Peyvand & Sarwal, Rakesh, 2003. "Governance of communicable disease control services : a case study and lessons from India," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3100, The World Bank.
    2. Fee, E. & Brown, T.M., 2004. "Depression-era malaria control in the south," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 94(10), pages 1694-1694.
    3. Khaleghian, Peyvand & Gupta, Monica Das, 2005. "Public management and the essential public health functions," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 33(7), pages 1083-1099, July.
    4. McGuire, James W., 2001. "Social Policy and Mortality Decline in East Asia and Latin America," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(10), pages 1673-1697, October.
    5. Samuel H. Preston & Michael R. Haines, 1991. "Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number pres91-1.
    6. Samuel H. Preston, 1980. "Causes and Consequences of Mortality Declines in Less Developed Countries during the Twentieth Century," NBER Chapters, in: Population and Economic Change in Developing Countries, pages 289-360, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Amiya Kumar Sahoo & Hari Charan Behera & Ajit Kumar Behura, 2022. "Philosophy of sustainable development: understanding public health," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 24(10), pages 12248-12262, October.
    2. Engel, Nora, 2008. "Drivers and Barriers of Innovation Dynamics in Healthcare - Towards a framework for analyzing innovation in Tuberculosis control in India," MERIT Working Papers 2008-077, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    3. Alka Chadha & Ali Mehdi & Garima Malik, 2007. "Impact of Preventive Health Care on Indian Industry and Economy," Development Economics Working Papers 22146, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research.
    4. Alka Chadha, 2007. "Impact of Preventive Health Care of Indian Industry and Economy," Working Papers id:1195, eSocialSciences.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rodrigo R. Soares, 2007. "On the Determinants of Mortality Reductions in the Developing World," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 33(2), pages 247-287, June.
    2. Das Gupta, Monica & Khaleghian, Peyvand & Sarwal, Rakesh, 2003. "Governance of communicable disease control services : a case study and lessons from India," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3100, The World Bank.
    3. David Cutler & Angus Deaton & Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2006. "The Determinants of Mortality," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 20(3), pages 97-120, Summer.
    4. Barnes, Geoffrey & Guinnane, Timothy W., 2010. "Social Class and the Fertility Transition: A Critical Comment on the Statistical Results Reported in Simon Szreter's Fertility, Class and Gender in Great Britain, 1860-1940," Working Papers 87, Yale University, Department of Economics.
    5. Stefania Albanesi & Claudia Olivetti, 2014. "Maternal health and the baby boom," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 5, pages 225-269, July.
    6. Zainab Iftikhar & Amanat Ali, 2012. "Impact Of Income Inequality And Defence Burden On Economic Growth," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 57(03), pages 1-15.
    7. Karen Clay & Werner Troesken & Michael Haines, 2014. "Lead and Mortality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 96(3), pages 458-470, July.
    8. James J. Feigenbaum & Christopher Muller & Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, 2019. "Regional and Racial Inequality in Infectious Disease Mortality in U.S. Cities, 1900–1948," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 56(4), pages 1371-1388, August.
    9. Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson & James A. Robinson, 2011. "Hither Thou Shalt Come, But No Further: Reply to "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Comment"," NBER Working Papers 16966, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Joseph Molitoris & Martin Dribe, 2016. "Industrialization and inequality revisited: mortality differentials and vulnerability to economic stress in Stockholm, 1878–1926," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 20(2), pages 176-197.
    11. Seema Jayachandran & Adriana Lleras-Muney & Kimberly V. Smith, 2009. "Modern Medicine and the 20th Century Decline in Mortality: Evidence on the Impact of Sulfa Drugs," NBER Working Papers 15089, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Olivetti, Claudia & Paserman, M. Daniele & Salisbury, Laura, 2018. "Three-generation mobility in the United States, 1850–1940: The role of maternal and paternal grandparents," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 73-90.
    13. Bengtsson, Tommy & Broström, Göran, 2009. "Do conditions in early life affect old-age mortality directly and indirectly? Evidence from 19th-century rural Sweden," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 68(9), pages 1583-1590, May.
    14. Schultz, T. Paul, 2010. "Population and Health Policies," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Dani Rodrik & Mark Rosenzweig (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 4785-4881, Elsevier.
    15. Sunder, Marco, 2013. "The height gap in 19th-century America: Net-nutritional advantage of the elite increased at the onset of modern economic growth," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 245-258.
    16. Vrachimis Konstantinos & Zachariadis Marios, 2013. "A contribution to the empirics of welfare growth," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 213-244, April.
    17. Salisbury, Laura, 2014. "Selective migration, wages, and occupational mobility in nineteenth century America," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 40-63.
    18. Jamison, Eliot A. & Jamison, Dean T. & Hanushek, Eric A., 2007. "The effects of education quality on income growth and mortality decline," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(6), pages 771-788, December.
    19. Irene Barbiera & Gianpiero Dalla‐Zuanna, 2009. "Population Dynamics in Italy in the Middle Ages: New Insights from Archaeological Findings," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 35(2), pages 367-389, June.
    20. Peter Lindert, 2003. "Why The Welfare State Looks Like a Free Lunch," Working Papers 59, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.

    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:wbk:wbrwps:3787. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    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.