Legal India
The Right to Health Care- Why, What & How- A Policy Brief for Public Discussion . Though written in the context of Tamil Nadu, this book would be of equal relevance to all activists and academics working for the achievement of Right to Health. The reason we chose to write in such a context-specific manner is to draw attention to how the context of both health systems and existing legal frameworks would greatly influence what goes into specific laws. The book also flags what are the systemic changes required for being to be able to effectively deliver healthcare as an entitlement and how this closely relates to the attainment of Health for All. Taken together, this book is more like a manifesto for the attainment of the right to health. This publication also informs the conceptual background of this web-portal.
“Sources of Legal Recognition of Health Rights” : the provide brief details of the International and National legal instruments that provide oblige governments to provide a legal framework for the Right to Health Including the Right to Healthcare. (This is the same note as given in the annexure 1of the Resource Collectives “Right to healthcare” publication linked earlier.
There are three important background documents that we post. These are reference documents for those actively working on developing legal frameworks.
First is the first draft bill for a National Health Act, 2009 that was drafted under the leadership of the NHSRC in year 2008-09 and went through extensive discussions and inputs from both civil society and some legal experts. It was a start, but it did not go far- both because of changed political situation ( viz the transition from UPA-1 to UPA 2) and internal criticisms and its own weaknesses.
Then we enclose the Right to Health Act, Assam, 2012, as adopted by the Government of Assam. It draws heavily on the draft national bill, but was a non-starter for the rules were never framed. Then history repeats itself and we present the Right to Health Act, Rajasthan, 2022 as adopted by the Government of Rajasthan. Here too the rules were not framed, but unlike in Assam it attracted far more of a supportive public response and a hostile professional response. To discuss the problems of this Act, we enclose one commentary published in Scroll and give links to two others.
Two other documents we provide links to are Tamil Nadu Public Health Act, 1939 and Tamil Nadu’s Clinical Establishments Act.2012.
Coming from macro-issues to specific aspects we enclose an interesting comment on an intervention by India’s Supreme Court in the pandemic response titled Human Rights and State Policy in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Adjudication as Accountability published in India in Transition: Centre for Advanced Studies in India: U. Penn, Politics: Special COVID-19 Series; June 7, 2021.
This is also the topic of discussion in the interview published in the Times of India-May 26th, 2021,“ on Everyone has an entitlement to vaccination against covid 19” This was an Interview of Sundararaman by Rema Nagarajan and it describes the changes in Indian policy towards universal vaccination and calls for addressing the equity challenges.
