Information Society Watch

I was reading on-line the latest Down to Earth magazine (June 25, 2007) which carries in its cover story, diseases that still are rampant in India, since they largely affect the poor and their is not much incentive for the pharmaceutical companies to invest in R&D to treat/cure them. For e.g. the Kala Azar disease largely affects the poor in Bihar and there is no medicine for it .... what is used is medicines that have been forumulated for diseases such as cancer etc...

the article suggests that public funding into R&D on health reasearch is critical for ensuring that medicines for the poor / treating ailments that affect the poor are indeed available...

while the need for complementing private enterprise with some strong public effort does appear evident, we are at the same time also faced with a growing disillusionment with Government itself. and this disillusionment seems to be strong even within govt cirles themselves ... witness the plans on the mega 'Community Service Centres' (CSS) scheme which has ambitious plans of providing access to 100,000 such centres serving 600,000 villages.

Recently we have met a few senior Govt officials to understand how they plan implementation of the scheme and the strongly pervading view is how these centres need to be driven on private enterprise and can't sustain on public effort. on how these need to be profitable to sustain ... and the need to provide information on government entitlements / schemes, which would be important for disadvantaged sections is either felt to be not critical or required. Or it is felt that the private operators would feel strongly about these governance services to provide these, even if it is at the cost of their own private services which is what is agreed, would get them the moolah. cant figure this one out ...