Incentivised Sterilisation: Lessons from India and for the Future

Family planning programmes in India have historically been target-driven and incentive-based with sterilisation seen as a key component of controlling population growth. This opinion paper uses India as the backcloth to examine the ethics of using incentive policy measures to promote and secure sterilisations within communities. Whilst we acknowledge that these measures have some value in reproductive health care, their use raises specific issues and wider concerns where the outcome is likely to be permanent and life changing for the acceptor

Vision 2020, the Multimedia Supercorridor and Malaysian Universities

Malaysia is one of the most ‘globalised’ countries in the Asian region. This statement is based on Kearney’s ranking of 62 countries using 14 indicators to test the degree of globalisation. Table 1 ranks some of the important Asian countries - from those that are the least integrated into the world system to the most integrated. Integrated and globalisation in this sense, are used as synonyms throughout this paper. Malaysia’s global position in 2004 reflected the achievements of the previous decades. In the 1990s, for example, the Malaysia government decided push the country in the direction of transforming itself from an industrial base into a K-economy based on knowledge and information technology. The universities were expected to play a role in this, but have they? This paper seeks to map out the contours of Malaysia’s integration in the world system, how this relates to Mr Mahathir’s ‘Vision 2020’ and finally how all of this has impacted on the higher educational sector

Can Self-Administered Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) Help Rural India? An Evaluation of the CoviSelf Kit as a Response to the 2019–2022 COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper evaluates India’s first officially approved self-administered rapid antigen test kit against COVID-19, a device called CoviSelf. The context is rural India. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) are currently popular in situations where vaccination rates are low, where sections of the community remain unvaccinated, where the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grow and where easy or timely access to RTPCR (reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction) testing is not an option. Given that rural residents make up 66% of the Indian population, our evaluation focuses on the question of whether this self-administered RAT could help protect villagers and contain the Indian pandemic. CoviSelf has two components: the test and IT (information technology) parts. Using discourse analysis, a qualitative methodology, we evaluate the practicality of the kit on the basis of data in its instructional leaflet, reports about India’s ‘digital divide’ and our published research on the constraints of daily life in Indian villages. This paper does not provide a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of CoviSelf in detecting infection. As social scientists, our contribution sits within the field of qualitative studies of medical and health problems. Self-administered RATs are cheap, quick and reasonably reliable. Hence, point-of-care testing at the doorsteps of villagers has much potential, but realising the benefits of innovative, diagnostic medical technologies requires a realistic understanding of the conditions in Indian villages and designing devices that work in rural situations. This paper forms part of a larger project regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in rural India. A follow-up study based on fieldwork is planned for 2022–2023

Business in Asia

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Globalisation and Labour Mobility in China

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