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Instead of diminishing with the spectacular advancement of medical expertise in the country , unqualified biomedical practice in India has been strengthened by the growth of the pharmaceutical production in the twenty first century. In public health discourse, the view that the informal health practitioners have to be punished and abolished has been countered by the recommendation that they could be trained and incorporated in primary health care where public health amenities are inadequate. The quality of care provided by the informal health care practitioners has also been subject to clinical assessment based on standardized patient vignettes. Based on a sociological approach, this paper examines the time line of chronically ill patients under lived conditions to arrive at an understanding of the role of informal health practitioners in long term treatment and highlights the setbacks. This paper draws on 253 household surveys from two villages in Madhya Pradesh, in depth interviews with four unqualified practitioners in the area, twenty five unstructured interviews of chronic patients, twenty five structured interviews on the cases of untimely death and FGDs with health workers in 2021. Informal health care practitioners offer consultation cum dispensing of medicines and are the primary source of biomedical care in the remote study area without any public transport. But they are 'for profit' economic actors who are ill-equipped to handle chronic diseases. What sets them aside from the qualified private doctors in the town is their social obligation to balance their profit motive with the ethics of proximity and neighborly ties with the villagers amidst whom they reside. These features of the market and community place the informal health care practitioners at the cusp of economy and society and defy simple binaries that they are either crooks or assets. • Unqualified health practitioners provide medical care in India where none is available. • Assessing their practices, clientele and exact role is crucial to health care policy. • One point standardized patient vignettes are used to assess their quality of care. • Their treatment of chronically and severely ill patients over time also has to be examined. • They are 'for profit' economic actors, but embedded in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes and analyses the Hadrami migration to and adaptations in Hyderabad, India. The various adaptive niches exploited by the Hadramis in Hyderabad before the merger with India in 1948 are outlined, particularly the ones relating to the military field. Hadrami officers and soldiers were a typical features of the Nizam's army. But this was to change with the Indian take-over in 1948. The second part of the paper outlines these changes as they relate to Hyderabad in general and to the new adaptive strategies adopted by the Hadramis in particular. The new evolving adaptations during the 1950s was based on petty trade and represented a downward turn in the fortunes of the Hadramis. During this period the Hadrami identity was fading and they tended to disappear among the other Muslims in the city. In the 1970s, however, labour migration to the Gulf helped improve the economic status of the Hadrami families, and it lead to a strengtheneing of the diasporic organisations that could facilitate the migration and which also strengthened the Hadrami diasporic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, we are looking at the relationship between globalisation and the professional project, using nursing in Kerala as an exemplar. Our focus is on the intersection of the professional project, gender and globalisation processes. Included in our analysis are the ways in which gender affects the professional project in the global south, and the development of a professional project which it is closely tied to global markets and global migration, revealing the political-economic, historical, and cultural factors that influence the shape and consequences of nurse migration. The phenomenon that enabled our analysis, by showing these forces at work in a particular time and place, was an outbreak of strikes by nurses working in private hospitals in Kerala in 2011–2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Since 1991, India has witnessed an explosion of new media. Between 1990 and 1999, access to television grew from 10% of the urban population to 75% of the urban population. Cable television and foreign movies became widely available for the first time. Despite being heavy users of this new media, nonelite urban middle-class men continue to be attached to previous family arrangements. The striking continuity of nonelite men''s gender culture in the face of new meanings introduced by foreign media suggests that institutions are fundamentally important in rooting the fit between cultural orientations and institutional structures. Social theorists today often emphasize the mutually reinforcing nature of culture – meanings, norms, values – and structure – the way society is organized. But contemporary theorists too often sidestep consideration of the relative causal importance of cultural and structural factors. This paper confirms Swidler''s argument that cultural “consistencies across individuals come less from common inculcation by cultural authorities than from the common dilemmas institutional life poses in a given society.” Changes resulting from globalization are, then, more likely to follow from changed structural realities than the introduction of new cultural meanings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]