Sonesh & Aravind

I've been lucky to have spoken to Sonesh about his work at Aravind a few times before as well as others who have worked at Aravind so while his presentation was great I had heard most of the information before.

As always, Aravind continues to amaze me and proves to be an incredible case to learn from and to try and better understand. The Aravind story and model highlight a number of critical lessons about health technology projects in the developing world and more about these particular types of projects in India. What always strikes me the most is how well the subsidization model works for Aravind while it may be seen as "classist" or exclusionary in other regions.

I do wonder how many different regions would welcome such a model (having two clinics for different socioeconomic classes such that one subsidizes the other) and how to best test or measure for that. I haven't come across any social science publications that analyze this type of care in depth although I'm sure more will begin to crop up as ethnograpy/anthropology etc become more mainstream in ICTD as they have begun to become over the past few years.