Public Health and Private Wealth

Description

Poverty was the predominant paradigm within which science policy was constructed in the late colonial, nationalist, and post-independence eras of India. Whether as critics of its poverty-related policies or as architects of measures for its poverty eradication, India’s commentators called on a broad framework of ‘science’ to both diagnose and treat poverty. Yet, when we think of science in India today, this earlier priority of poverty eradication is hard to find. Poverty eradication as a goal in itself seems to have fallen off India’s scientific agenda. What accounts for this? Has the problem of poverty in India been solved? Or has it become an inconvenient subject alongside the new narratives that frame India as a site of remarkable economic growth? The essays in this volume locate these questions within the politics of health in modern India. Insisting that the commodification of health and medicine is fundamentally about economies of bodies, yet irreducible to conventional economic frameworks, the essays pursue the questions of who wins and who loses in India’s health economies. As this problematic transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, the essays cut across studies of development and demography, research laboratories, and the rural and urban poor, combining the methodologies of anthropologists, sociologists, health economists, science studies and public health scholars, and historians.

Table of contents

List of Tables and Figures List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction: Science, Technology, and Medicine in India— The Problem of Poverty Sarah Hodges and Mohan Rao Part 1: The Quest for ‘Improvement’ 1. Colonial Poverty: Nutrition, Disease, and the Problem of the Poor David Arnold 2. Tubercular Optics: Health, Techno-science, and the Obfuscation of Poverty Lakshmi Kutty 3. ‘Surveillance for Equity’? Poverty, Inequality, and the Anti-politics of Family Planning Rebecca Williams Part 2: India’s Hospitals: For Whom? 4. Globalization and the Health of a Megacity: The Case of Mumbai Ramila Bisht and Altaf Virani 5. Commercialization and the Poverty of Public Health Services in India Rama Baru 6. ‘It All Changed after Apollo’ and Other Corporate Hospital Myths Sarah Hodges Part 3: National Techno-science and Promising Bodies 7. The Globalization of Reproduction in India: From Population Control to Surrogacy Mohan Rao 8. Biotechnology in India: Catalyst for a Knowledge Era? Priya Ranjan 9. Stem Cell Research and Experimentation in India: Leveraging Hope for Global Prominence Rohini Kandhari Afterword: Mainstreaming Indigenous Knowledge— Genealogy of a Meta-concept Dhruv Raina Notes on Editors and Contributors Index