Market Menagerie: Health and Development in Late Industrial States

摘要

Smita Srinivas's book comes with an arresting title, commendations from senior scholars on the dust jacket, and high expectations raised by her earlier empirical work on the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, Srinivas's starting point holds promise: while India has developed a notable pharmaceutical industry, the access to health care for the bulk of Indians is precarious, for a range of reasons. For example, poor infrastructure (she mentions electricity cuts, water shortages, and an overall lack of public health facilities [p. 122]) makes the delivery of both preventive and curative health-care inputs to rural areas a matter of chance. The book promises to explain the reasons for this bias, whereby policies that so successfully encouraged indigenous drug production accompanied haphazard and fitful initiatives in the provision of health care. It appears as if the Indian government considered that the moral demands of a welfare state required only the production of cheap drugs; all else was left to the individual supplicant of medical care.