EVENTS

Established in 1948 as a specialised agency of the UN, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was faced with numerous geopolitical challenges shaped by the Cold War. Between 1949 and 1957, the USSR and its allies withdrew from the WHO citing ideological differences with the US. The US declared that disease led to poverty and it was the breeding ground of communism, therefore, eradicating disease would prevent the spread of communism to newly independent countries. Following which, the WHO became captive to US’s national interests during the 1950s and embarked on a narrow program of disease eradication and regionalisation. WHO Director General Brock Chisholm (1948–53) advocated decentralisation as a pragmatic step to meet diverse health needs in different parts of the world. WHO headquarters characterised the central and south-eastern parts of Asia, including the Indonesian archipelago/ “the Monsoon Asia of Geographers” as a single epidemiological area. The SEARO- WHO's first regional office established in 1948 in New Delhi during its first decade, launched mass campaigns against endemic diseases, between 1948 and 1960. The speaker will examine SEARO’s efforts to balance its role between ensuring compliance of member states with prescriptions of international aid agencies and liaising with the WHO headquarters for increased budgetary allocations for Southeast Asia.

Speaker

Vivek Neelakantan is a medical historian, and a 2023 Brocher Visiting Fellow. After earning a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Sydney in 2014, he pursued a two-year postdoc at IIT Madras (2015-17). Since 2015, he has taught variously at Universitas Airlangga in Indonesia, IIM Indore, and IIM Kozhikode as visiting faculty. His research has attracted external funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the Truman and Eisenhower Presidential Museums and Libraries, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and Brocher Foundation. His monograph Science, Public Health and Nation-Building in Soekarno-Era Indonesia, published by Cambridge Scholars in 2017, examined Indonesia’s relations with the WHO during the Cold War and the appropriation of social medicine by nationalist physicians. His recent edited volume The Geopolitics of Health in South and Southeast Asia: Perspectives from the Cold War to COVID-19 (2023) examines the significance of a regional approach to global health policy.

Chair

Rama V. Baru is a former Professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and an Honorary Fellow, at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, India. She is also an Honorary Professor at the India Studies Centre, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China. Her research interests include study of commercialisation of health services, infectious diseases, comparative health systems and health inequalities. She is currently a member of the Ethics Committee at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the Technical Appraisal Committee for Health Technology Assessment, the Department of Health Research, the Ministry of Health, the Government of India and the Scientific Advisory Group, Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi. She has authored four books: Private Health Care in India: Social Characteristics and Trends (1998); School Health Services in India: The Social and Economic Contexts (2008); and Medical Insurance Schemes for the Poor: Who Benefits (2015). Her recent publications are Commercialisation of Medical Care in China: Changing Landscapes Routledge Publications, 2020 (co-authored with Madhurima Nundy), Global Health Governance and Commercialisation in India: Actors, Institutions and the Dialectics of Global and Local (2018) a co-edited a volume (with Anuj Kapilashrami).

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