Urban Health: Participation of the Urban Poor and Communication

Three fundamental tenets of this article are: ‘whether all the sections of urban poor have been sufficiently considered’, ‘participation of urban poor vis-à-vis urban health’ and ‘communication for mobilizing community participation’. Urban poverty in India has a global significance as about 39.8 per cent of the world’s urban poor live in India (The World Bank, 2008). Their number in India is not only matched by the number of urban poor in a single country but even by the number of urban poor in any other subcontinent. Participation of the urban poor in improving and maintaining urban health becomes very crucial as they are the most health-vulnerable and suffer from highly impoverished quality of life characterized by deprivation from basic services related to health and hygiene. However, the application of participatory principles in urban health has been hitherto neglected unlike the emphasis on participation since long in the arena of rural health. Any schemes and programmes of urban health will hardly succeed unless they incorporate the component of community participation. The article analyzes the extent to which the various sections of the urban poor, and especially women, are considered while considering the issues of urban health. For example, though ‘slum dwellers’ are many times regarded as a homogenous category, the most neglected among them are those residing in non-notified slums and are hitherto highly...
Source: Journal of Health Management - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Articles Source Type: research