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

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...

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Published inThe Journal of development studies Vol. 56; no. 5; pp. 907 - 928
Main Authors Das Gupta, Monica, Dasgupta, Rajib, Kugananthan, P., Rao, Vijayendra, Somanathan, T. V., Tewari, K. N.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England Routledge 03.05.2020
Taylor and Francis
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Borders
Child development
Cities
Developing countries
GOVERNANCE
Health indicators
Health problems
HEALTH SERVICE DELIVERY
Health services
Health status
LDCs
Management
MUNICIPAL HEALTH
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Public health
Public services
Slums
URBAN HOUSING
Vulnerability
South Asia
India
Urban
Governance
Public Administration
Health
Service Delivery
South Asia
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Summary: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.
Bibliography:South Asia
India
ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0022-0388
1743-9140
DOI:10.1080/00220388.2019.1605053