Ghungroo Grant: Neel in India

Who? What? Where?

July 6th, 2007

So… I’ll use this blog to talk about my experience working with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India this summer. Currently an undergraduate economics concentrator at Harvard, I have received funding from the Harvard SAI and SAA through the Ghungroo Grant to complete a project dealing with SEWA’s new telemedicine program in Gujarat, India.

A little bit about telemedicine (this might be a bit dry)…

Telemedicine consists of linking up superspeciality urban hospitals with poor, understaffed, rural hospitals in India, in order to provide otherwise inaccessible specialty consultation and training of health workers. With its potential to bridge the urban/rural gap in health care access and quality, telemedicine represents a promising solution to the persistence of poverty in a country plagued with health care inequities such as India. The Indian government and NGO’s have been experimenting with telemedicine over the past several years, and only recently has this technology developed to prove an efficient solution to meeting health care needs. Now, even the private sector in India has begun to embrace telemedicine as a profitable means to serving the poor. In short, telemedicine is kind of hot in India right now.

A little bit about SEWA and my project…

As a very large and influential NGO in India, SEWA has recently started its own telemedicine program linking up 2 private hospitals (the Apollo Hospital and the Vaghad Trust Hospital) with 9 rural district hospitals. My project is to help optimize their newly created system. I will analyze the cases attended so far and help design a system and process of telemedicine to maximize benefit to the rural poor. I will talk to hospital doctors and rural health workers and eventually help implement the proposed changes and orient them to the new system.

Although I’ll be based in Ahmedabad, I will travel to rural district hospitals in Gujarat for most of the week so I might not have regular internet access. That means that I’ll try to update this blog as frequently as I can, and aim for something regular at least weekly, if not bi-weekly.

Hopefully this blog will help me document my first encounter with healthcare in India and translate my experience as the rural Indian reality colors my perception of developing world… or something like that.

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