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The branding of ayurveda as a market strategy for the health consumer has become an important factor in the creation of 'New Age orientalist desire'. Using Vedic Village as a case, this paper shows how new age orientalism has been spread in modern India to middle class professionals, entrepreneurs and overseas health tourists. With this representation, ayurveda has become a wellness therapy instead of a means to restore health, and affluent people can now buy a package of 'ayurvedic healthy life' without changing their lifestyles. In addition to Euro-American health tourists, emerging middle class professionals and entrepreneurs in modern India have also become an integral part of the process of 'new age orientalization'. This paper concludes that the commodijied version of ayurveda, which has been developed in the West as part of 'wellness and spa culture', has become popular among the affluent middle class in India and abroad today, and through this the West has claimed and justifies authority over Eastern medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the United Nations Millenium Declaration of 2000, the establishment of Self-Help Groups (SHGs) has been identified as a significant strategy in addressing the alarming levels of poverty and marginalisation that have accompanied global development. SHGs are small, voluntary associations of people from the same socio-economic background that have been established for the purpose of solving shared social and economic problems through self-help and mutual help. Such grass-roots commonality, it has been assumed, will promote community empowerment and prevent economic marginalisation. Such an assumption is largely based on the global, neo-liberal agenda of seeing the withdrawal of the State from social provisioning. SHGs have been widely adopted in India, especially to eliminate the social exclusion of poor women and improve their access to health. This article reviews the scope and limitations of SHGs in improving women's health, focusing on their implementation in the State of Bihar in India. It critically assesses the extent to which SHGs can be involved in attaining better health for women and children by exploring the crucial role of caste and class in access to health services. The article concludes that solutions such as SHGs, which emanate from international policy circles, fail to capture local structural contexts such as caste and class and, as a result, develop instrumentalised approaches that are unlikely to produce equitable health services provision to poor and marginalised people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]