Zoom Link:
https://unilu.zoom.us/j/96980410248?pwd=WUVJcVZzVTgxRWpTOWtjSWp0QnMzUT09

Meeting ID: 969 8041 0248
Passcode: 500274

Providing “healthcare for all” has been an aspiration throughout India’s postcolonial health policies. Since public spending remains relatively modest, various kinds of private actors have been playing an important role, mainly in the secondary and tertiary healthcare sector. In this presentation, I analyse the more recent phenomenon of market-led developments in the primary sector using the example of health entrepreneurship.

Following a digital healthcare project supported by the West Bengal state government and implemented by a social enterprise, I describe how providing access to healthcare for low-income populations is not only perceived as a social service but also as an economic potential. Although health services are offered for low rates, ’microhealthcare’ is expected to succeed financially through scale. Simultaneously, health workers are trained to become health entrepreneurs and are employed in franchise-like models. I show how this mirrors more general transformations in the country, as India has changed over the past decades from a developmental state that attempts to manage poverty to an entrepreneurial state that provides “austerity welfare” (Kar 2017) and supports the “proliferation of enterprise around poverty” (Irani 2019).