Within the health sector, failure to implement primary health care policies as originally conceived has significantly aggravated the global health crisis. These deficiencies include: A retreat from the goal of comprehensive national health and drug polices as part of overall social policy.

• A lack of insight into the inter-sectoral nature of health problems and the failure to make health a priority in all sectors of society. A failure to promote participation and genuine involvement of communities in their own health development.

• Reduced state responsibility at all levels as a consequence of widespread and usually inequitable policies of privatization of health services.

• A narrow, top-down, technology-oriented view of health and increasingly viewing health care as a commodity rather than as a human right.

• My effort aims to draw public attention to the adverse impact of the policies of iniquitous globalisation on the health of Indian people, especially on the health of the poor.

• It needs to be stated on record that public attention on the passing of the year 2000 without the fulfillment of the ‘Health for All by 2000 A.D.’ pledge. This historic commitment needs to be renewed and taken forward, with the slogan ‘Health for All - Now!’ and in the form of the campaign to establish the Right to Health and Health Care as basic human rights. Health and equitable development need to be reestablished as priorities in local, national, international policy-making, with Primary Health Care as a major strategy for achieving these priorities.

• In India, globalisation’s thrust for privatisation and retreat of the state with poor regulatory mechanisms has exacerbated the trends to commercialise medical care. Irrational, unethical and exploitative medical practices are flourishing and growing. There is a need to confront such commercialisation, while establishing minimum standards and rational treatment guidelines for health care.

• In the Indian context, top down, bureaucratic, fragmented techno-centric approaches to health care have created considerable wastage of scarce resources and have failed to deliver significant health improvements. In other words it needs to be emphasized that there is urgent need to promote decentralisation of health care and build up integrated, comprehensive and participatory approaches to health care that places “Peoples Health in Peoples Hands”.