Biography
Abhijith Nair is a doctoral candidate at King’s College London, where his research focuses on the political economy of private healthcare governance in India.
In 2024, he was awarded a four-year Inlaks PhD scholarship to study at King's India Institute. He has previously completed his MA in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad, India.
Research
Thesis title: 'Governing the healthcare market: A comparative study of the political economy of private healthcare in South India'
As countries start to reimagine a future that is capable of guaranteeing universal health coverage, a central question confronting many developing countries—where the state is not the major health provider—is how to steer private healthcare provisioning towards public goals. This study addresses this question in India, which has one of the most privatised healthcare systems in the world. Despite the prevalence of private healthcare in India, the governance of healthcare markets varies widely across the country. Understanding how and why there is variation in approaches to governance across Indian States with arguably similar levels of state capacity forms the mainstay of this research. To develop an explanation for this variation in governing private healthcare provisioning, the study employs a comparative case study of two South Indian states—Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
The study seeks to make two key contributions to the existing scholarship on health policy. First, it brings politics into conversation with health policy—which much of the existing literature treats as predominantly a technical domain. Second, it develops a fine-grained, contextually grounded explanation as to what enables some subnational units in India to better align private objectives effectively toward public goals than others.
PhD supervision
- Principal supervisor: Professor Louise Tillin
- Secondary supervisor: Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal