Dear Niya and Tanvi, I learnt so much reading this issue, particularly how India's work on public health spawned in the shade and service of other national goals. Thank you for dedicating three issues to helping us understand the history of public health in India. As with other issues in this newsletter, the way you lay down painstakingly researched past of public health makes the present so much clearer for me.
In addition to the above, your thoughts that refer to instrumentality are particularly striking and salient for how policy is often practiced by those outside the government. In search of relevance and attribution that is some concoction of sincerity, desperation and vanity, policy practitioners often find themselves selling the issues they work on using this instrumentality; a la "let's work on women's livelihoods because it's good for economic growth; let's support community groups because that's a good platform for public service announcements". Your observations on containing malaria for agricultural productivity, influenza and family planning are reminders that this instrumentality can, over time, erase the intrinsic value, and with it, its underlying morality of value of human life, often leaving only the goals that lend themselves to aggregate measurement as worthy of time and resources. Policy practitioners would be well advised to remember that 'history has its eyes on you'.
All this is indeed in addition to how beautiful it is how you identify and articulate the state of the world, such as our present being often indistinguishable from our past.
Your concluding observation on how health is not a fundamental right in India is particularly instructive of the choices we have made as a country, and points to a weakness that needs to be addressed, lest we continue to optimize under structural constraints that offer an illusion of hope, good enough for everyone to continue running their shop.
Dear Niya and Tanvi, I learnt so much reading this issue, particularly how India's work on public health spawned in the shade and service of other national goals. Thank you for dedicating three issues to helping us understand the history of public health in India. As with other issues in this newsletter, the way you lay down painstakingly researched past of public health makes the present so much clearer for me.
In addition to the above, your thoughts that refer to instrumentality are particularly striking and salient for how policy is often practiced by those outside the government. In search of relevance and attribution that is some concoction of sincerity, desperation and vanity, policy practitioners often find themselves selling the issues they work on using this instrumentality; a la "let's work on women's livelihoods because it's good for economic growth; let's support community groups because that's a good platform for public service announcements". Your observations on containing malaria for agricultural productivity, influenza and family planning are reminders that this instrumentality can, over time, erase the intrinsic value, and with it, its underlying morality of value of human life, often leaving only the goals that lend themselves to aggregate measurement as worthy of time and resources. Policy practitioners would be well advised to remember that 'history has its eyes on you'.
All this is indeed in addition to how beautiful it is how you identify and articulate the state of the world, such as our present being often indistinguishable from our past.
Your concluding observation on how health is not a fundamental right in India is particularly instructive of the choices we have made as a country, and points to a weakness that needs to be addressed, lest we continue to optimize under structural constraints that offer an illusion of hope, good enough for everyone to continue running their shop.