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Since the 2000s, hundreds of government-funded health insurance (GFHI) schemes were introduced in India. These schemes are meant to prevent poorer households from incurring catastrophic health expenditures. Through GFHIs, policy-makers want to mobilize the decision-making powers of private consumers in a liberalized healthcare market. Patients are called upon to act as 'co-creators' of healthcare value by optimizing supply through demand. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with insurance users in South India, we argue that GFHIs fail because people experience the value of insurance in drastically different ways that only partly overlap with how the policy assumes they value insurance. In addition, the hollow promises of health coverage can be experienced as so frustrating that signing up for health insurance actually makes people feel devalued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnography of one family's life with diabetes in a poor settlement in Delhi's suburbs, this paper examines the relationship between emotional structures of care and kinship in the face of chronic illness. While anthropologists have argued for a relational understanding of care and discussed how, in India, modernity and social transformations have resulted in crises of familial care, less attention has been paid to the emotional terrains of care and its difficulties as they unfold in concrete relationships over time. This paper demonstrates how emotional intensities define the possibilities, limits, and ambivalence of kin care for the chronically ill. Described as care without heart, this mode of attention implies a continuation of care labour that maintains kinship ties and holds the possibility of kin futures, but is disinvested emotionally and feels unsatisfactory. The analytic of care without heart expresses a particular mode of care by which persons navigate dominant moral regimes around gendered family responsibilities and imperatives of love in relationships, but without fully subscribing to them. Care without heart at once signifies an inadequate form of care, invokes North Indian normative moral regimes around family care responsibilities and emotions, and acknowledges the shortcomings of these regimes and norms of relatedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From research in central Chhattisgarh, this paper interprets the bearing that healthcare beliefs and practices may have in shaping maternal and child nutrition both in the light of biomedical recommendations and within the context and constraints of a rural village setting. It contends that health beliefs and practices that are at variance from biomedical recommendations appear to have few consequences for gestational nutrition and for child health in relation to pregnancy. In the postpartum however, health ideas at variance from biomedical recommendations appear to have an important bearing on maternal nutrition and infant feeding, and may put mothers and children at risk of nutritional deficiency. Maternal 'eating down' following a surgical procedure such as a caesarean delivery or tubectomy is especially noteworthy, since food intake quantity is reduced over an extended time frame. While caring practices are influenced by cultural formulations, they also reflect, perhaps, adaptations to health risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]