INTRODUCTION Urban centres often perform audits of vancomycin use as they face outbreaks of resistant organisms. We undertook this study to understand the indications and duration of intravenous vancomycin in a rural setting. METHODS We conducted a retrospective chart audit for all patients who received intravenous vancomycin over a 3-year period at a rural hospital in northwestern Ontario. ...

that in rural Uttar Pradesh (UP), only about one-fourth of women delivered their last child in an institution.a In 2005 the Janani Suraksha Yojana ( JSY) was launched as an intervention to address the barriers to institutional delivery, through the introduction of community-based women volunteers called Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs). Women in rural areas in low performing states ar...

Introduction Introduction of comprehensive framework for community-based monitoring (CBM) and planning at various levels of the public health system has been one of the most significant policy initiatives under the national rural health mission. One of the key considerations while introducing this large-scale social experiment was to fill the accountability deficit of the public health system b...

The past decade has seen communication revolution in the form of cellular telephony as well as the Internet, but much of it has been restricted to the developed world and metropolitan pockets in the developing world. While the use of cellular technologies can cut down on the time to deploy access networks, the cost economics make this non-viable in growing telecom economies. In the Digital Gang...

We test hypotheses on the role of socio-economic and cultural factors and of characteristics of the educational infrastructure on primary school enrolment using data for 70,000 children living in 439 districts of 26 states of India. Most of the variation in educational enrolment (around 70%) is explained by factors at the household level, of which socio-economic factors are most important. In u...

China’s internal migration is estimated at >120 million; farmers make up 70% of them. There are 4.5 million Chinese suffering from TB, cause of highest number of death from infectious diseases. We ask “Is out-migration for work a risk factor of TB?” In 2002-04 we studied 160 new TB cases and 320 controls in rural Henan. Results of statistical analyses confirm that work migration is a significan...

This paper explores potential channels through which information technology (IT) affects economic development. The channel emphasized here is the reduction of transaction costs through the use of information technology. We discuss the nature of transaction costs, their possible impacts on economic outcomes, and the impacts of IT on transaction costs. We provide a theoretical discussion of how a...