Mohalla Clinics

Mohalla Clinics was first set up by the Aam Admi Party government in 2015, and as of 2020, 450[3] such clinics have been set up across the city and served more than 16.24 million residents.[4][5] The Government has kept a target of setting up 1000 such clinics in the city before 2020 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections. According to the World Health Organization data for the year 2015, more than 65% of the population in India paid for health from their own pockets. The Hindu, meanwhile reported in 2017 that only 17% of people in the country have health insurance.[6][7] The idea behind the initiative is that India, being one of the largest out-of-pocket health expenditures and least coverage of health insurance in the world, can offer the free health services in the form of Mohalla Clinics thus to help reduce the financial burden on low-income households by saving travel costs and lost wages.

In December 2017, India's renowned cardiac surgeon and founder of Narayana Health, Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, visited a mohalla clinic in Todapur, Delhi. He was amazed by the healthcare facilities provided to the general public by the Delhi Government.[8] In a letter to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, in the capacity as chair of The Elders, an international non-governmental organisation of independent global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan commended Mohalla Clinic project.[9] The praise for the mohalla clinic project also came from the former Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland at the Prince Mahidol Award Conference at Bangkok, Thailand after a presentation by Delhi health minister Satyendra Kumar Jain.[10]

The Straits Times, an English-language daily broadsheet newspaper based in Singapore finds Mohalla Clinics to be high-tech where results of most of the tests are known within two minutes and are uploaded onto an IT cloud for access by patients and their doctors on their smartphones and the clinic's tablets.[11] Meanwhile, in a report published by The Washington Post, it suggests "It may well be time for America to build mohalla clinics in its cities". The report also features Swasthya Slate, a $600 medical device for instant diagnosis developed by Kanav Kahol, a biomedical engineer and researcher at Arizona Svtate University’s department of biomedical informatics. [12]

In a scholarly article published by Economic and Political Weekly in 2020, researchers, based on the survey data, analysed the standing of Mohalla Clinics among the people they intended to target. Of 493 respondents, 65-67% had a similar opinion that the "doctors at AAMCs performed better than or at par with the facilities they previously accessed." 91% of the respondents viewed it as an experiment which significantly reduced "waiting time". Along with these positive remarks, respondents also mentioned instances of untouchability which in some forms does exist in AAMCs as "health practitioners overwhelmingly and disproportionately belong to upper and middle castes," who "often assert a pattern of dominance." Researchers found "large-scale segregation within slums, most notably against Dalits, particularly Valmikis and Chamars," which also has led to "discrimination in terms of healthcare access since some upper-caste houseowners stopped people from oppressed castes from entering clinics that were operating on their property."[13]

• Article: Mohalla Clinics of Delhi at United States National Library of Medicine
• Article: Health Care in the Mohallas at Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics at Delhi Government's Web Portal