Letters

Relevant Topic

I am highly impressed with the cover-story of February 2008 on 'Corporate Governance-Mission or Money?' written by Jayata Sharma and Nancy Singh It's really a topic to be contemplated. Thanks for providing us such a nice article and I expect some morearticles from you. Good luck!

Dr Avadhesh Agrawala
IIHMR
Jaipur

Good Article

Congratulations to Nancy Singh on a fabulous article in the April issue - 'WHO Cares for HIV/AIDS.' I thank the writer for highlighting this issue of rural HIV services.

I really liked the way the writer brought in the anecdotes of Hollywood and Bollywood stars publicising HIV/AIDS to draw the reader into the issues of rural populations. Hope to read more such articles in the coming issues. Best wishes.

Dr L Ramakrishnan
Country Director (Programs and Research)
Solidarity and Action Against the HIV Infection in India

Well-researched Article

The cover story of your March Issue on the Wockhardt IPO- 'Bulls Behind, Bears Ahead' by Nancy Singh deserves a lot of accolades. Not only was it well presented, it was well researched too.

Having said that, I think timing and pricing of an IPO are not the only factors. Otherwise, how would you explain the IPO of the lesser known Rural Electrification Corporation (REC] being subscribed 28 times in the same time period. Moreover, the famous Visa Cards IPO in USA, despite the slowdown, was subscribed to the tune of $18 billion, the highest ever in the history of the US!

A strong brand and numerous other extraneous variables also play a vital role in winning or losing the investor confidence.

Vivek Shukla
Marketing Consultant
Dharamshala

A Different Set of Opinion

This is regarding the edit piece of May issue. I usually like the edit pieces. Even this one is thematically good, but I don't agree with the suggestion of increasing out-turn of doctors and allowing more production in the private sector. We actually over produce doctors, but that is for the world market. So the problem is about regulating the professionals and introducing schemes like compulsory supervised practice in public institutions for all doctors for three to five years. This is the only way out. A country like Australia does precisely this. The way the private health market operates is bound to be subject to continuous market failures because healthcare is a public good and the developed capitalist countries are the best examples of that - providing universal access to healthcare under the oversight and coordination of a public agency, though services are usually a public-private mix. The same is true of medical and nursing education which remain largely in the public domain in those countries.

The other issue I wanted to express my concern was about your May cover story on the Express Healthcare Excellence Awards. Are these awards for genuine excellence or for elite healthcare institutions which invariably survive on frauds? Apollo group is a classic example of fraud in healthcare. They thrive on public subsidies and never honour the social commitments that go with these subsidies (despite exposure by the Quereishi Commission of the Delhi High Court). And they get awarded for excellence. Instead of looking for excellence in such profit-mongering institutions, the Express Group should look for genuine excellence - small hospitals working in rural and semi-rural India which provide excellent healthcare services struggling with market forces because their clients are poor or lower middle class - individual dedicated doctors, NGOs, mission hospitals and so on or even activists like Dr Binayak Sen who was doing excellent health work with the deprived adivasis, but was thrown behind bars by the state Government labeling him a Naxal.

Ravi Duggal
Healthcare Activist

'Ahalia Was the First to Come up with Health City in Kerala'

This is with reference to the article 'Passage to Better Healthcare' in May 2008 issue of Express Healthcare. In the snippet headlined Kerala 'K''alling, the writer has mentioned Dr Azad Moopen contending that Dr Moopen's Healthcity is the first of kind in Kerala.

However, we want to point it out that Ahalia Healthcare campus had embraced this concept of a healthcity in 1998 itself and the first phase of implementation is almost complete with a tertiary care eye hospital and an Ayurvedic Hospital functioning now. A lot number of hospitals, heritage centres etc in the campus are also in the anvil.

Jerry Abey Chittooran
Coordinator
Department of Academic Affairs
Ahalia Health and Heritage Campus
Palakkad, Kerala