Health Outcomes and Policy in India

After reviewing health outcomes and policy in India, this chapter concludes that there are at least six sets of issues to be addressed with regard to improving the quantity and quality of health services, and ipso facto improving health outcomes, in India. First, the amount of resources earmarked for health needs to increase. Second, health resources need to be used in a fair and just manner and, in particular, complaints relating to egregious health outcomes need to be addressed. Predominant in this set of issues is oversight and regulation of private sector health provision. The third set of issues relates to the allocation of health resources and, in particular, to the imbalance in the allocation of health resources between towns and villages. A fourth issue is the accessibility of rural areas since it is the most remote areas that have the lowest density of health workers. Another issue is the more efficient use of health workers in order to make them more productive. Finally, Indian health policy is stronger on rhetoric and aspiration than it is on action and implementation. The successful implementation of policy requires the explicit recognition that objectives are often competing (primary versus tertiary care) and the acknowledgement that, with budgetary constraints, one cannot have more of one without having less of the other. The first role of policy is to then choose the optimal mix of objectives with respect to these trade-offs. Secondly, policies come up against vested interests which agitate (often with the support of opposition politicians) and litigate against proposed changes. Lastly, policies in India are made against a background of poor governance with the predatory presence of corruption looming over every policy initiative. In implementing, rather than simply articulating, policy it is important to address these governance issue

Migrants, State Responsibilities, and Human Dignity

This article addresses two questions: First, how does the value of human dignity distinctively bear on a state’s responsibilities in relation to migrants; and, secondly, how serious a wrong is it when a state fails to respect the dignity of migrants? In response to these questions, a view is presented about the distinction between wrongs that violate cosmopolitan standards and wrongs that violate the standards that are distinctive to a particular community; about when and how the contested concept of human dignity might be engaged; and, elaborating a three-tiered and lexically ordered scheme of state responsibilities, about how we should assess the seriousness of a state’s failure to respect the dignity of migrants

Hey, my data are mine! Active data to empower the user

Privacy is increasingly getting importance in modern systems. As a matter of fact, personal data are out of the control of the original owner and remain in the hands of the software-systems producers. In this new ideas paper, we drastically change the nature of data from passive to active as a way to empower the user and preserve both the original ownership of the data and the privacy policies specified by the data owner. We demonstrate the idea of active data in the mobile domain