Health and Family Welfare Programmes in Developing Countries: Study of Innovations in an Indian State

Increasing accessibility and improving quality of public health programmes has been an important focus in developing countries in advancing the health status of the people. In this pursuit, many countries have initiated innovative activities for various services they provide and these have been implemented in varying degrees. However, detailed documentation on these activities is scarce and this hampers sharing of knowledge on implementation of innovations among programme managers, researchers and trainers—seeking information in improving their health systems. The author has tracked the growth of health and family welfare system in India and four Indian states, to study innovations in the health system with a special emphasis on Rajasthan. He has undertaken the detailed study of these innovations in the health system. Besides, he has also examined the conceptualization of innovation, the translation of the idea into a programme of a scheme, the activities undertaken to implement and monitor innovations. The first innovation relates to a scheme designed for the girl child, the second relating to the initiation of a large scale community based contraceptive programme and the third is an organizational innovation of starting a communication bureau to consolidate and invigorate the communication activities being undertaken by the health system. Based on the analysis of various stages of their innovations, the author in the last chapter, proposes a theory for the initiation and implementation of innovations in public systems. The book will be found extremely useful to policy makers, administrators and social and health management experts who are interested in the process of innovations in health and family welfare systems.