Articles by T K Sundari Ravindran

Women experiencing violence most often decide to seek legal action only after the violence has escalated and that too without having any documentary evidence. The Dilaasa crisis centres at two public hospitals in Mumbai since 2001 have been established out of the recognition that the public health system is an important site for the implementation of anti-domestic violence intervention programmes. The crisis centres therefore straddle both discourses of public health and gender. The paper offers critical insights into the model and its impact in terms of its ability to reach out to women who are undergoing abuse and offer them multiple services in one setting.

In recent years public-private partnerships have been offered as the miracle-cure that would help fix all the challenges to the health sector. Over the last decade, a number of ppps providing maternal health services have come into existence but few have been evaluated. This paper examines whether ppps with the for-profit private sector which provide maternal health services have contributed or are likely to contribute to making quality maternal health services accessible at affordable prices to the poor and marginalised sections of the population, as envisaged by policymakers. The limited evidence indicates that they have not increased either availability or physical access to services for a vast majority of women living in rural areas. The investment of substantial government and donor resources in ppps without robust evidence on their contribution to reduction of maternal mortality does not appear justified.