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Medical travel and transnational healthcare involve various difficulties such as the distance and disconnect between patients and healthcare providers, language barriers or logistical challenges of moving ill bodies across space. Medical travel facilitation steps in with some sort of brokerage service that contributes to overcoming or managing these difficulties and, as this paper suggests, acts to create a quality of 'smoothness'. By unpacking three salient facilitation practices, namely connecting, communicating, and coordinating, this paper conceptualises the empirically derived category of 'smoothness'. This as a disposition, outcome, and spatio-temporal manoeuvre of medical travel facilitation. Based on the way in which such practices of mediation act to create smoothness, namely in an attentive, persistent, and collective tinkering manner, this paper suggests that some practices of medical travel facilitation are productively thought not just about setting up the possibility of care transnationally, but that they are key forms of care in itself. Based on these findings, smoothness is considered to be a central but also contested quality of medical travel facilitation and brokerage in a broader sense, but as proposed here, also for care. This conclusion potentially has implications not just for the study of transnational healthcare and mediation activities, but also that of care and transnational mobilities more generally. • Medical travel facilitation creates smoothness in mediating transnational healthcare. • Conceptualising smoothness as a disposition, outcome and spatio-temporal manoeuvre. • Brokerage and an STS-take on medical travel facilitation and care. • Smoothness as a quality of medical travel facilitation, brokerage and possibly care. • Medical travel facilitation between Oman and India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As planners and policymakers in cities around the world struggle to attract and retain public transit users, this paper explores strategies to promote transit adoption in contexts where the odds are stacked against transit. Using travel behavior data from India's National Capital Region – one of the most congested metropolitan areas globally that is experiencing unprecedented growth in personal vehicle ownership and plummeting transit ridership – this study analyzes the choice of intra-urban (metro) rail over personal car for commute trips within a specific population sub-group that is fast adopting the personal car and exiting the transit market. The objective of this mode choice analysis that employs both logistic regression modeling and the propensity-score matching technique is to identify multi-modal service quality/performance factors that determine metro rail vs. car choice, and thereby recommend efficient and effective interventions for inducing car-to-transit switches in addition to retaining existing transit riders. Results suggest that increasing metro rail's travel time competitiveness relative to car (particularly for long distance commuters), service frequency and safety level, and raising car parking cost at the destination can increase the likelihood of choice of metro rail over car in the study context. Interestingly, increase in traffic congestion and travel time unreliability of the car mode are not expected to automatically boost the demand for metro rail use, all else equal. As the momentum towards more car adoption continues, this study shows that deteriorating traffic conditions may not push drivers out of cars; rather, public transit has to step up and pull drivers out of cars. For planners and policymakers, this study indicates that rather than passively waiting for driving conditions to worsen, they should proactively invest in transit service quality improvements. This study also highlights the importance of communicating service changes to the traveling public in order to efficiently translate interventions to behavior changes, given the dissonance between travelers' perceptions of multi-modal travel conditions and actual travel conditions. This paper further demonstrates that analysis of travelers' perception errors, including variation in error across travelers, is important for accurately modeling travel behavior changes in response to interventions. The findings add to the literature on mode choice analysis, and provide strategic advice for transit agencies in India and across other comparable contexts globally. • This study suggests ways to promote car-to-transit switches in fast-growing economies. • Regression analysis and propensity-score matching used to determine drivers of transit choice. • The importance of investing in fast, frequent and safe transit, and the role of parking cost are highlighted. • Traffic congestion and unreliability will not automatically boost transit demand. • Value of information communication and recognizing travelers' perception errors are underscored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Choice of marketing channels varies by farmer and location characteristics. • Poor transport and communication networks restrict farmers' market access. • Lack of infrastructure and information lead to rent seeking by informal buyers. • Most farmers particularly smallholders get lower than government mandated price. Abstract This paper assesses the effect of transportation and communication networks on farmers' choice of market channels for paddy and wheat, and subsequently on the prices they receive from these channels. It is found that smallholder farmers sell more to informal channels i.e. local traders and input dealers, and typically receive lower prices from them compared to the government-set minimum support prices (MSP). The prices realized from the sales in regulated markets are also less than the MSP despite these being claimed to be more transparent in price discovery. Econometric results show that farmers' access to transportation and information enables them to obtain better price terms from informal as well as formal channels. The effect of information is relatively stronger, implying that farmers' access to transportation itself is not sufficient but is effective when combined with provision of market information. Further, our proposition is that despite a positive impact of the improved market access on price realization from informal traders, farmer-trader relations are unlikely to undergo a meaningful change because of the tied transactions involving inputs, credit and outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs have taken aim at malnutrition's multi-sectoral roots through re-diversifying agricultural production while integrating women's empowerment and nutrition behavior-change communication components. For these integrated nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, women-led self-help groups have emerged as promising platforms for program delivery. Yet, while well-designed nutrition behavior-change communication has been successfully used in self-help groups, and is central to nutrition-sensitive agriculture, it can take many forms. These vary widely in their theoretical and ethical underpinnings, communication strategies, and theory of change. As nutrition-sensitive agriculture continues to proliferate, it is critical to better understand how women interact with different behavior-change messages and how to engage individuals in ethical, effective ways. This paper analyzes qualitative data collected from a nutrition-sensitive agricultural project in India that used participatory storytelling to generate knowledge and awareness about malnutrition among women. Drawing from data across two sites, the paper analyzes why certain messages generated more discussion among women then others. We find self-help group women were drawn to topics of early marriage and diet diversity because they emotionally connected to them, and felt they were relevant to their lives with high perceived pay-off and actionability. While other topics on gender and health also provoked emotional, lively discussions, the stories were less effective due to their complexity, which were difficult for volunteer facilitators to communicate. We conclude that there is unmet demand among women in rural India for structured spaces to discuss gendered aspects of health and diet, and nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs could benefit from focusing attention here. • Engages debates on health behavior change communication (BCC) ethics and efficacy. • Examines modified participatory learning and action (PLA) run in women's groups. • Finds women were drawn to simple, actionable messages they emotionally related to. • Insufficient investment in volunteers' PLA facilitation skills hampered impact. • There is need for more BCC focused on women as women, rather than mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast amount of knowledge and experience on coping with climatic variability and extreme weather events exists within local communities, and indigenous coping strategies are important elements of successful adaptation plans. Traditional knowledge can help to provide efficient, appropriate and time-tested ways of responding to climate change especially in far-flung communities. However, little is known about how traditional coping strategies translate into adaptation to long-term changes, and to what degree they prevent pro-active, transformational responses to climate change. This paper assesses the use of climate related information for communities in the Himalayan foothills of rural India, and reports on the barriers to adaptation planning and actions. Surveys have been carried out to analyze the current practices and the role of information in planning for climate change adaptation in the rural areas of the Nainital region of India located in Western Himalaya. Respondents perceive the local climate change, the intensity of change, and the negative impacts on the community and landscape. Decreases in water quantity and changes in precipitation patterns are among the major concerns for respondents, however, communities have begun to use traditional knowledge and historical climate information for developing strategies suitable to cope with impacts of climate change. Going forward, additional information is needed to match the high priority community needs with viable adaptation strategies. Lack of money, lack of access to information, and lack of awareness or understanding are considered the three largest hurdles besides low priority for adaptation, recognized by community members as barriers to adaptation planning and actions. Adaptation plans must be integrated into both top-down and bottom-up approaches to plan for enabling sustainable development and the efficient use of information for adaptation. Finally, traditional knowledge seems to be useful not only in contrasting climate change impacts, but also in recovering several ecosystem services that work all together for enanching the quality of life of villagers at local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the effectiveness of performance pay and bonuses among government childcare workers in India. In a controlled study of 160 ICDS centers serving over 4000 children, we randomly assign workers to either fixed bonuses or payments based on the nutritional status of children in their care, and also collect data from a control group receiving only standard salaries. In all three study arms mothers receive nutrition information. We find that performance pay reduces underweight prevalence by about 5 percentage points over 3 months, and height improves by about one centimeter. Impacts on weight continue when incentives are renewed and return to parallel trends thereafter. Fixed bonuses are less expensive but lead to smaller and less precisely estimated effects than performance pay, especially for children near malnutrition thresholds. Both treatments improve worker effort and communication with mothers, who in turn feed a more calorific diet to children at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]