{"id":35456,"date":"2018-10-31T17:39:40","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T12:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=35456"},"modified":"2018-10-31T17:39:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T12:09:40","slug":"why-india-fails-to-deliver-health-and-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/why-india-fails-to-deliver-health-and-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Why India fails to deliver health and education:\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.livemint.com\/Opinion\/EWzq6HdjOg8CgMLtkYZcyN\/Why-India-fails-to-deliver-health-and-education.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why India fails to deliver health and education<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Context<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tragic death of scores of children recently at the BRD Medical College hospital in Gorakhpur has reopened the discussion on India\u2019s weak state capacity.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>India\u2019s failure<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the last 70 years, the Indian state has clearly failed at delivering quality education and public health to its citizens.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This raises a couple of troubling questions:<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">1) Why have democratic institutions not been able to generate sufficient pressure upon successive governments to deliver better health and education services?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">2) Why has high economic growth in the last quarter-century not created an improvement in government provision of services?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The work of Monica Das Gupta<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Democratic institutions in India have negatively affected the provision of public health because\u2014as Das Gupta writes\u2014\u201celectorates typically prefer public funds to be used to provide private goods (such as medical care), rather than public goods (such as sanitary measures to protect the health of the population as a whole).\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The non-democratic regimes of East Asia were more successful in delivering quality public health services.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gupta blames \u201celite capture\u201d which helps divert public funds meant for primary healthcare towards provision of tertiary medical services.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It should be noted that there is not much evidence to link higher economic growth to better institutions. The causality is better established in the other direction.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, there is some evidence that higher economic growth may actually lead to degradation in governance quality.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The key here is the distinction between \u201cthick accountability\u201d and \u201cthin accountability.\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For an organization, thin accountability is based on measures of objective performance and is judicable.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the other hand, thick accountability comprises justification of organizational actions to internal culture and external stakeholders.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Setting the curriculum for schools is, therefore, something states with a weak capacity will be able to deliver much better than ensuring teaching standards.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In healthcare, similarly, tertiary healthcare service is easier than making doctors deliver in primary healthcare centres.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Both weak electoral demand and weak state capacity are reinforcing the same consequence, which, in healthcare for instance, is prioritization of tertiary medical services over primary healthcare.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why India fails to deliver health and education:\u00a0 Context The tragic death of scores of children recently at the BRD Medical College hospital in Gorakhpur has reopened the discussion on India\u2019s weak state capacity. India\u2019s failure In the last 70 years, the Indian state has clearly failed at delivering quality education and public health to&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/why-india-fails-to-deliver-health-and-education\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why India fails to deliver health and education:\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704953551},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}