India

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of posts on my summer field experience in India. The purpose of this trip is to gather some formative research on how people in the rural areas of Karnataka State, India experience and perceive the informal payments for otherwise free health care. This is a form of petty corruption that has been dealt with in the past through things like sting operations, whistleblower statutes, and other "top-down" strategies.

The long term goal of this work is to develop some "bottom-up" approaches, where users of these services change the way they think about these services, that rather than being a pawn in a big game, they can play a role in ensuring that their care is delivered fairly, and in accordance with the law. The first step in developing an approach is to determine whether they see this as a problem at all, and if so, what their feelings and attitudes are about it. This will help to develop a language for discussion of these issues with those who are most affected by the phenomenon of informal payments.

I'll be working with Dr. H. Sudarshan, who is Vigilance Director for the Karnataka Ministry of Justice. Aside from his position with the civil service, he has been working for over 20 years on empowering people, especially the rural poor, to stand up for their rights. He has his own NGO, Karuna Trust, that has provided health care and skillbuilding activities in the rural areas of Karnataka State since the early 80s. http://www.karunatrust.org/

From what I gather, Sudarshan should be an interesting character. A weekly googling of his name reveals an ongoing stream of his efforts to uncover large-scale corruption rings in Bangalore and the surrounding areas. He seems like a pretty well-known and respected figure in India and elsewhere. Aside from my own research, it should be a real experience shadowing a man like that for a month or so.

For most of the time I'll be living in Bangalore, above the India Literacy Project in the city center. I'll be spending a lot of time traveling to rural areas to conduct my research. This should be an unbelieveable lesson in the contrasts of modern life with the ways that people have lived since antiquity, compounded with the industrial squalor unique to our time. It'll be a little of everything.