Articles by Brijesh C Purohit

This article investigates the impact of COVID-19 on the banking sector through the trend analysis of return on assets and return on equity of the scheduled commercial banks. It covers both the pre- and post-lockdown periods. The results suggest that the governmental measures are helping ameliorate situations of bad quality loans and will improve future prospects of the banking industry.

This paper attempts an analysis of efficiency variation in health system performance in Karnataka. By using the stochastic frontier technique, it provides an idealised yardstick to evaluate the performance of the health sector. Carried out in two stages of estimation, the results of our model, using district-level panel data, indicate that the efficiency of the public health delivery system in Karnataka remains low. Considerable disparities across districts in per capita availability as well as utilisation of hospitals, beds and manpower inputs hamper improvements in life expectancy in the state. Results from the second stage of estimation suggest that in rural areas particularly, improvements in infrastructure facilities like safe drinking water supply, toilets and electricity as well as better coordination between social sector and economic policies, especially at the district level, may also help the state improve life expectancy speedily and more equitably in the deficient districts.

Brijesh C Purohit Tasleem A Siddiqui Until 1982 public teaching hospitals in Rajasthan provided diagnostic facilities such as Xrays, free of cost of patients. Budget constraints have compelled the institutions to introduce an auto financing scheme (AFS) aimed at recovering variable costs of the tests. The experience of the AFS scheme provides useful pointers about user-charge mechanisms.

Utilisation of Health Services in India Brijesh C Purohit Tasleem A Siddiqui The pattern of utilisation in our country had some desirable outcomes, namely, growing popularity of indigenous non-allopathic systems and growth in private sector's involvement in expensive tertiary care. As against the National Health Policy guidelines the regional disparities in health service utilisation among different expenditure groups of states as well as rural-urban disparities tend to continue. Further, in spite of inadequacy of health services and prevalence of inequality in utilisation, there has been no serious governmental initiative to encourage appropriate utilisation by means of devising health insurance and other cost recovery mechanisms.