People’s Health Movement in India

‘Health movement’ as an area of social work has been comparatively a newer tradition that has emerged during last 25 years. In India, today about 10 million people are pushed below the poverty line annually because of unaffordable health care expenditure on hospitalization. About a third of the hospitalized patients either borrow money or sells assets to pay the hospital bill. This situation of spread of new diseases due to environmental or socio-cultural degradation and the problem of unavailability or good quality, appropriate humane services to all the needy is a serous socio political problem and it would require a broad-based, popular People’s Health Movement to tackle it.