The Social Determinants of Health in India: Concepts, Processes, and Indicators

Drawing from the work of academics and practitioners from ten states across the country, this edited volume showcases and synthesises the diversity and richness of efforts to understand and act on the social determinants of health in India, the conditions in which we are born, grow, live work and age. Such an effort is salient in the current era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which have  foregrounded the issue of equity and the need for a comprehensive, multi-sectoral agenda for health and development. In India, particularly in the last decade, there have been myriad efforts to more critically theorise and intervene in areas with bearing on health,  like conflict, nutrition or urbanisation, or to address the concerns of vulnerable groups like women, children and the elderly. From these efforts emerge lessons of convergence for academic and policymaking institutions in India who are looking to operationalise and bring life to the SDG agenda in India and other Low and Middle Income Country settings. The book comprises eleven chapters and six short commentaries that appear in conversation with each other, as well as an annexure of validated, ready-to-use indicators for monitoring of social determinants of health.

Devaki Nambiar is a Senior Research Scientist at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) who employs social science theory and mixed methods to understand and address health inequalities and social exclusion in health systems of resource-poor settings. She concurrently supports post-graduate training and capacity building in health policy and systems research as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health – Delhi. She is also a Bernard Lown Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health working with community health workers on improving access to primary health care services related to non-communicable diseases. She has a doctorate in Public Health (PhD) from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Arundati Muralidharan is Manager Policy for WASH in Health and Nutrition, Schools at WaterAid India. From 2012-2016, she was a Senior Research Fellow at PHFI. As a public health practitioner and qualitative researcher, Arundati is interested in addressing the factors that underlie and influence health and health behaviour, with the aim to identify and promote effective, evidence-based strategies. Her focus is on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and gender. She has a Masters in Medical and Psychiatric Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and a Doctorate in Public Health (DrPH) from Boston University.