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Speaker: Dipika Jain is Professor of Law, Vice Dean (Research), Vice Dean (Clinical Legal Education) and the Director of the Centre for Justice, Law and Society at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), India. Her research was recently cited by the Supreme Court in the landmark decision of Navtej Johar v. Union of India (2018) and X v. The Principle Secretary Health (2022). In 2018, she was designated as the first Research Associate Professor at JGLS. In 2020, her research was cited in the legislative debate on abortion laws in the Indian Parliament
Healthcare, State and Market Nexus: The Case of Community Healthcare Workers in India
Abstract: Contemporary literature on political economy finds almost uniformly that politics and economics are gendered and do not operate in disparate fields.[1] This inter-relationship reflects a seismic shift in how economics and other supposedly unrelated spheres of study such as politics, law, gender, among others, have been traditionally explored. To be useful as a lens, gender needs to move beyond the binary male-female dichotomy, encompassing race, nation, ethnicity, class, and other dimensions of social life, to reflect the varying experiences of persons across these spectrums.[2]
A gendered political economy begins by concerning itself with the contributions of people to “work” and how different genders and groups are treated in the accounting of national economy.[3] In this paper, I use political economy theoretical frameworks to analyze research findings of an empirical study undertaken in three districts of Haryana to comprehend the challenged faced by the frontline community healthcare workers in India called the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers. Liberalization policies in the 1990s resulted in a marked decline in health expenditure, along with encouragement of private sector service delivery, autonomy and revenue building. Such liberalization, along with healthcare sector developments by international agencies played a role in limiting the budget towards public health services. Therefore, although the ASHAs were brought in as a central component of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), they were expected to work on a voluntary basis while providing critical healthcare services.
The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946). For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.
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Professor of Law & Social Justice