The Government of India set up the ‘Health Survey and Development Committee’, popularly known as the ‘Bhore Committee’ in 1943 to draw up the scheme of health services for the newly emerging independent India. The recommendations made by the committee remain a landmark in the development of health services in the country and continue to inspire the health workers in the country in their struggle for developing pro-people health system.

The neo-liberal transformation of global economy has brought in a new trade regime replacing GATT 1947 with incorporation of services and intellectual property in the products to be exchanged and WTO as its powerful regulator. Health being one of the services has become tradable for the first time. India has chosen to engage in health trade substantially to drive economic benefits from medical tourism, export of pharmaceuticals and manpower, and to carry out contract clinical trials.

This article suggests how the Gandhi–Ambedkar–Narayanaguru–Marx visions can be synthesised in support of the movement for the liberation and empowerment of India’s dalits. It brings out the beginnings and evolution of Gandhji’s sensitivity and opposition to ‘untouchability’.

Social movements have been considered by many sociologists as agents of social transformation. Emergence, dynamics and development of social movements not only signal major transformations of societies; but, social movements are indicators of societal conditions, and capable of influencing social and political structures as well.

Projects undertaken without the knowledge of their likely social impacts tend to produce unintended hardships for the local population.

A National seminar on the FRA was organised by the Council for Social Development on 26–27 April, 2010. Most of the participants reported that all of the key features of this legislation have been undermined by a combination of apathy and sabotage during the process of implementation.

The main premise of political ecology is that environmental change is not a neutral process amenable to technical management. Rather, it has political sources, conditions and ramifications that impinge on socio-economic inequalities and political process.

This article reports findings from a survey of anganwadis, undertaken in the tribal region of Gujarat. It was found that services were poorer in the more backward and distant hilly areas than in the plain areas of the region. The coverage of population by anganwadis was not uniform and was disproportionately divided even within the same village.

Community participation emerged as the defining principle of forest policies all over the world in the closing decades of the last century. In India, this came about after the Indian forest policies went through different stages from largely commercial-centric to a community-oriented approach.

Health sector reforms associated with decentralization, contraction of public sector, service contracting, user fees, etc., influence health sector both from the demand side and the supply side. In the wake of decreasing public expenditure on health, it is necessary to find the other factors that could take care of the health status. This article is an attempt to find the impact of economic reforms on infant mortality rate and life expectancy at birth. The study is based upon secondary data. Statistical tools like mean, ranking, and regression models are used.