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Despite substantial strides to improve cancer control in India, challenges to deliver oncology services persist. One major challenge is the provision and accessibility of adequate infrastructure. This paper offers ethnographic insight on the conceptual and material conditions that are currently shaping the delivery of oncology in Mumbai, focusing specifically on the way India's socio-economic context necessitates non-biomedical acts of voluntarism or 'seva' (selfless service). Developing the premise that hospitals are not identical clones of a biomedical model, detailed attention is paid to the way 'care' emerges through 'praxis of place' (Casey, 2003) within the cancer hospital as a multi-scalar 'heterotopic' (Street and Coleman, 2012) site. Such a perspective enables global/local tensions to come into view, together with the heterogeneous confluence of juxtaposing materialities, imaginations, social practices and values that both propels and constrains the everyday delivery of care. The paper reflects on the theoretical implications of hospital seva in Mumbai in light of social science studies of hospital ethnography and health activism and contributes important ethnographic insight into the current global health debates regarding effective implementation of cancer services in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals in developing countries often engage in paid and unpaid work till late in life due to low household savings and limited welfare provisions. Yet, physical disabilities associated with aging can limit their ability to work. While work can be beneficial for economic and psychological well-being, this paper investigates whether engagement in paid and unpaid work mediates the impact of physical disabilities on quality of life for older adults. We exploit the different levels of health services and social security in rural and urban China and India to examine the effect of public provisions in the process. We use nationally representative data of individuals aged 50 and above from the World Health Organization Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health Wave 1, conducted in 2008–10 in China and in 2007–08 in India. Using a causal mediation analysis framework, we find that paid work plays a minor role in mediating the effect of physical disabilities on quality of life in all societies, and the mediated effect is smaller in urban China than in other societies. Unpaid work is beneficial only in urban China, and it does not mediate the impact of physical disabilities on quality of life elsewhere. The findings indicate that promoting productive engagement alone, without improving basic public provisions, will have limited impact on improving quality of life of the aging population in developing countries. • In developing countries, both paid and unpaid work is common out of necessity. • Older adults bear a double burden of paid and unpaid work in rural China and India. • Productive aging has limited impact on quality of life in developing countries. • Impact of productive aging on quality of life varies with public provisions. • Physical disabilities associated with aging is less consequential in urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The paper evaluates an Indian maternal conditional cash transfer scheme. Launched in 2005, the program gives women cash transfers for receiving maternal and child health care services. Data are drawn from India’s District Level Household Survey to evaluate the program’s impact. Results indicate that the program had a limited overall effect: relative to the broader population, the targeted population experienced a 3 percentage point increase in medically supervised births, but no increase in ante-natal or post-natal care. We do however, find evidence of heterogeneity of impact. Women without any formal education and women in rural areas experience disproportionate gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political embeddedness of public-sector primary care in urban India. The low quality of urban healthcare in many low- and middle-income countries is well documented. But there is relatively little analysis showing how the politics of urban healthcare delivery contribute to quality shortfalls. This study integrates urban and political theory and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in municipal government-run primary care clinics in Pune, India. I conceptualize Pune's municipal doctors as street-level bureaucrats: frontline state agents charged with delivering public services, who regularly confront conflicts between their mandate and its realization in practice. I observe how the municipal doctors experience and respond to these conflicts; delineate the historical design of the municipal institutions in which they operate; and interview doctors, nurses, nonclinical staff, administrators, and elected officials, who collectively shape primary care delivery in municipal clinics. My findings show how the doctors' work is characterized by routine departures from public service ideals. The departures stem from local electoral politics (politicians' patronage and clientelistic relations with municipal employees and patients) and weak administrative capacity (misuse and incompetent planning of public resources). The doctors are compelled to follow extra-policy directives, meaning instructions that have little to do with healthcare goals and that emphasize the political utility rather than medical purpose of their work. In response, the doctors circumscribe their clinical practice. They aim, as one doctor put it, only to "ensure the ordinary," or to sustain a deficient status quo. In these conditions, improving quality of care requires not just behavioral interventions targeted at doctors. It requires normative, social, and organizational shifts in public service planning and delivery so that doctors are positioned – materially and affectively – to meet urban healthcare challenges in low-resource contexts. • Urban politics and corruption can contribute to low quality of public healthcare. • Doctors in municipal primary care clinics in India confront politics in everyday work. • Ethnography can show how doctors experience and respond to political directives. • Doctors receive directives to accommodate patronage, clientelism, and mismanagement. • Regularly facing deficits in public integrity, doctors sustain low-quality care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]