The objectives of the study are three-fold: to investigate who are vulnerable to welfare loss from health shocks, what are the household responses to cope with the economic burden of health shocks and if policy responses like state health insurance schemes are effective in reducing the economic vulnerability. Existing literature have investigated the impact of state health insurance schemes in reducing the vulnerability to financials risks of medical care using catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) measure.
This has several limitations like setting arbitrary threshold levels, exclusion of those that did not seek medical care due to inability to pay and non-accounting for risks posed by different sources of financing. So we use self-reported measure of reduction in economic wellbeing of households due to serious illness or death of one or more members from the recent Young Lives longitudinal study in Andhra Pradesh,
Five years ago, a mid-summer nightmare named Aila crashed on the Sundarbans with murderous fury and wreaked destruction beyond repair. On May 25, 2009 the tropical cyclone hit the Sundarbans in India and Bangladesh with a wind speed of 110 km/hr.
Over 8,000 people went missing and more than a million were rendered homeless in the two countries. In India about 300 people were killed in Sagar Island alone in the Indian Sundarbans. Figures can scarcely do justice to record the number of homes destroyed, lives lost and livelihoods decimated.
Child undernutrition and flooding are highly prevalent public health issues in many developing countries, yet we have little understanding of preventive strategies for effective coping in these circumstances. Education has been recently highlighted as key to reduce the societal impacts of extreme weather events under climate change, but there is a lack of studies assessing to what extent parental education may prevent post-flood child undernutrition. One year after large floods in 2008, we conducted a two-stage cluster population-based survey of 6–59 months children inhabiting flooded and non-flooded communities of Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha (India), and collected anthropometric measurements on children along with child, parental and household level variables through face-to-face interviews. Using multivariate logistic regression models, we examined separately the effect of maternal and paternal education and other risk factors (mainly income, socio-demographic, and child and mother variables) on stunting and wasting in children from households inhabiting recurrently flooded communities (2006 and 2008;
Based on a household survey in Indian Sundarbans hit by tropical cyclone Aila in May 2009, this study tests for evidence and argues that health and climatic shocks are essentially linked forming a continuum and with exposure to a marginal one, coping mechanisms and welfare outcomes triggered in the response is significantly affected. The data for this study is based on a cross-sectional household survey carried out during June 2010. The survey was aimed to assess the impact of cyclone Aila on households and consequent coping mechanisms in three of the worst-affected blocks (a sub-district administrative unit), viz. Hingalganj, Gosaba and Patharpratima. The survey covered 809 individuals from 179 households, cross cutting age and gender. A separate module on health-seeking behaviour serves as the information source of health shocks defined as illness episodes (ambulatory or hospitalized) experienced by household members.
Finding reveals that over half of the households (54%) consider that Aila has dealt a high,
More than 70 million people died in famines during the 20th century. This paper compiles excess mortality estimates from over 30 major famines and assess the success of some parts of the world – China, the Soviet Union, and more recently India and Bangladesh – in apparently eradicating mass mortality food crises. This is contrastes with the experience of sub-Saharan Africa where famines precipitated by adverse synergies between natural triggers (drought) and political crisis (civil wars) have become endemic since the late 1960s.
The paper also examines the evolving discourse around famine causation during the century, and finds that despite the proliferation of demographic, economic and political theories, each embodies the reductionist perspective of disciplinary specialisation. The paper concludes by arguing that if famine is to be completely eradicated during the 21st century this requires not just technical (food production and distribution) capacity but substantially more political will,
