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WEEK 5 ASSIGNMENT

Business, Government and Society

Health and Education are sectors that cater to everyone through failing public systems. The two
cases look at examples of private sector initiatives that provide the same on a smaller scale. How
are they better able to provide services when the larger public system seems to be inadequate?
Would an improved public system mean that these organizations will not survive?
Although significant improvements have taken place in the education and heath domain since the
1950’s, but maintaining the quality standards for almost 1.3 billion people is not an easy task to
accomplish. Over the years, several Non-governmental organizations(NGOs) have stepped in to help
the government in realizing its aim of providing quality education and healthcare. But most of these
efforts have been not been able to reach the scale as desired.
The success of these NGOs can be attributed to the fact that they don’t have to worry about the creation
of necessary infrastructure. They leverage existing government facilities to bring in the innovations like
Sampark Smart Shala required to raise the quality standards. The government is concerned with more
basic metrics like enrolment ratio, dropout rates, student (patient) to teacher (doctor) etc. NGO’s like
Sampark come in only after the government is successful in getting a child to attend the school as
opposed to workng in household work or paid labour. Hence, success of these organisations is due to
the basic foundations laid by the government. The focused attention of these NGOs as opposed to ever
changing priorities of the government also leads to difference in the quality of the outcomes.
The healthcare innovations brought in by the organisations like JSS have been very successful, but
scaling them is not an easy task. Being implemented on the focused and narrow scale, these initiatives
are able to onboard staff willing to take pay-cut for the larger good. However, for government to
implement these ideas on a nation-wide scale, it is very difficult to maintain the quality of doctors,
teachers and staff without slashing market salaries. Currently, 70% of the revenues of JSS is through
donations and grants and they offer salaries only one-fourth of that of market rates. In a country like
India, where medical education is very costly, it is practically not possible to get enough quality doctors
to work on pay levels similar to JSS.
Although health is a state subject in India, funding and schemes are driven through the center and hence,
political balance is necessary for quality in these services. Hence, differences in the state and centre
leadership also leads to many inefficiencies. Also, recent modification of Patent Act to move from
process to product patent has increased the cost of the healthcare sector. This makes subsidies costlier
to be given on a large scale. Thus, implementing the successful examples of private sector initiative
done on smaller scales become challenging to implement on a larger scale.
Even with an improved public system, there is little probability of 100% implementation and success.
The major change drivers, even then, would be the NGOs, who would bring about improvement and
help in filling gaps that are present in the system. NGOs, as we have already discussed, have innovative
techniques which seek to improve quality and not showcase numbers. They seek to make a connection
with the receiver and thus are more successful on a smaller scale. The authors believe that an
improvement in the public sector would actually create more scope for advancements. This would be
undertaken by the NGOs and other similar organizations. Another point of view is that people seek to
connect more with the NGOs, which leads them to avail their services. The NGOs also understand this
and hire locally most of the times. As we have seen from the JSS case, local hiring led to increased
employment and more patients coming to avail their services. Hence, the authors believe that the current
organisations will not only continue to survive, but also grow in scale and scope.

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