Aam Aadmi Research Articles

Impact of Mohalla Clinic On Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare in Delhi

This paper analyses the role of the Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinic in improving women’s healthcare in Delhi and how they cater to the demands of women patients. Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinic provides basic services in underserved areas without any fees in a responsive manner. This programme has gained significant attention nationally and internationally, particularly regarding primary health care. So many other states in India are planning to implement this kind of programme for the improvement of their healthcare system. This paper covers the facilities provided by Mohalla Clinic and the women's patients' experience in getting benefits from Mohalla Clinic. This paper aims to explore and analyze the role of Mohalla Clinics in enhancing women’s healthcare focusing on how these Mohalla clinics have made women’s healthcare easy to access by providing service near the neighborhoods. This study shows that, ultimately, there is a lack of awareness among women about the facilities provided by Mohalla Clinic and these clinics are not well equipped, most of the Mohalla Clinics are functioning under the porta cabins. This paper also investigates the challenges faced by Mohalla Clinics in tackling gender-specific health issues and suggests some possible solutions to improve their effectiveness in catering to women’s healthcare needs.

An ethnography of voting in the Punjab elections 2022 as social practice: Liminal spaces of symbolic change

ABSTRACT The paper attempts to look at the factors leading to the victory of the Aam Aadmi Party which have not been taken up by the traditional political analysis. Making an ethnography of the Punjab assembly elections 2022 in the Malwa belt of Punjab, it chronicles the social and cultural impact of the farmer’s movement, particularly its far-reaching impact on changing the mood of the electorate. The paper also focuses on the novel digital election campaign which resulted in new election outcomes from the past trends and a massive victory for the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab.

Breaking Hegemony of Traditional Political Parties: A Study of Shifting Dalits’ Support Base in Punjab

The present study is an analysis of Dalits’ shifting support base among major political parties in Punjab, namely Congress, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and specifically Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2022 Punjab Assembly election. With an established presence in the State, the AAP could present itself as a new alternative. The AAP defeated all the traditional/mainstream political parties in the recent Assembly election to put an end to the deeply entrenched family (SAD-Badal) and dynastic rule (Congress). The present research paper is an effort to find out the causes behind the shifting Dalit support base. The AAP’s success was a clear message from the people of Punjab that they were fed up with the power circle of traditional parties that were in agreement with each other to rule the State by turns. Paper argues that Dalits are likely to vote for the parties that have a chance to come to power as in 2022 Punjab Assembly Election, Dalit support base has widely shifted to AAP. The study was qualitative and conducted in the Doaba region of Punjab. It is an analysis of the interactions with 300 respondents of the targeted SCs population and 30 leaders from the major political parties in Punjab.

Gujarat 2022 Elections: Explaining BJP’s Hegemony

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) victory in the 2022 Gujarat state elections not only broke a record but also reversed the trend that was resulting in Congress’ growing effectiveness election after election. This time, the Congress registered its worse performance ever, largely because of the entry of a new player, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), but also because of the progress of the BJP. The ruling party is stronger than ever because of its ideology, its organization and, more importantly, its leader, Narendra Modi. These assets allow the BJP to get support across caste, classes and sub-regions like never before. Its rise, however, challenges democracy in different ways, not only its ‘OBCisation’ is not a synonym of plebeinization in terms of class, but its strategy of equating religious majority and political majority and to systematically undermine the opposition tends to make the BJP ‘the only game in town’.

A ‘New India’ for the Arab World

Abstract This article investigates the formations of ‘Brand Modi’ and ‘Brand Bollywood’ and their strategic and overlapping foray into the United Arab Emirates, considering it a pivotal moment in contemporary transregional media production. Two branding campaigns form the basis of my analysis: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly mediatized 2015–2018 U.A.E. visits and Shah Rukh Khan’s 2016–2019 ‘#BeMyGuest’ campaign for Visit Dubai (the Emirate’s official tourism brand). Attending to questions of branding techniques, diasporic identity and historical imagination, I examine how these campaigns play on notions of the common man or aam aadmi and the upwardly-mobile and cosmopolitan ‘New Indian’ through the celebrity personas of Modi and Khan. I argue that this creation of a ‘New India’ for the Arab world seeks to efface down class connotations of India and Indians in Arab imaginaries by re-framing India as a key diplomatic and cultural-infrastructural partner of the Emirates.

A comparison ofthe cost ofoutpatient care delivered by Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics compared to other public andprivate facilities inDelhi, India.

Aam Admi Mohalla Clinics (AAMCs) were introduced in Delhi in 2015 as neighbourhood clinics to strengthen the delivery of primary care. To inform the policies on government investments for outpatient care, this study estimated the cost of outpatient care per visit in Delhi for 2019-20 for AAMCs and compared it with urban primary health centres (UPHCs), public hospitals, private clinics and private hospitals. Facility costs for AAMCs and UPHCs were also estimated. Using the data from a national health survey, government annual budgets and reports, a modified top-down methodology was adopted to measure the true cost of public facilities, taking into account both government expenditure and out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE). Inflation-adjusted OOPE was used to measure the cost of private facilities. The cost per visit at a private clinic at ₹1146 (US$16) was more than 3-times higher than that at a UPHC (₹325/US$5) and 8-times higher than that at AAMCs (₹143/US$2.0). These costs were ₹1099 (US$15) and ₹1818 (US$25) at public and private hospitals respectively. The annual economic cost per facility of a UPHC at ₹ 9 280 000/$130 000 is ∼4-times that at AAMC (₹2 474 000/$35 000). Unit costs are found to be lower at AAMCs. Utilization for outpatient care has shifted in favour of public primary care facilities. Higher investment in public primary care facilities with expanded services for prevention and promotion, upscaled infrastructure and a gate-keeping mechanism can strengthen the delivery of primary care and promote universal health care at a lower cost.

Government Health Insurance Schemes and Their Benefits to The Indian Population: An Overview

In today’s scenario accelerating cost of health significantly impact the health of people and the populace creating a monetary burden on poor households. One of the key concerns while tackling healthcare disparities is out-of-pocket expenses (OOPE). Providing financial safety and provide universal coverage to the entire populace are the main goal of health schemes. Health policies in India are based on equity prioritising the needs of the poor and underprivileged. Likewise, there is a discrepancy in the consistency of information and knowledge regarding the scheme among the beneficiaries. A review was created to help medical and nursing professionals to gain comprehensive knowledge of various health schemes. We tried to give an overview of various health schemes including Ayushman Bharat Yojana, Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana (AABY), Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana (PMSBY), Rashtriya Swasthya BimaYojana (RSBY), Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS), Employees State Insurance Scheme (ESIC), Employee Health Scheme and various state-level health schemes. include, Yeshasvini Health Insurance Scheme, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Jan Arogya Yojana, Chief Minister Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme, Mukhyamantri Amrutum Yojana, Karunya Health Scheme, Awaz Health Insurance Scheme, Telangana State Govt Employees and Journalist Health Scheme, Dr Ysr Aarogyastri Health Care Trust, Mukhyamantri Chiranjeevi Yojana, Rajasthan Government Health Scheme (RGHS), and Aarogya Raksha.

The Impossible Portrait

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a portrait of a young Somali man living in Delhi, India. The portrait depicts him in a park in South Delhi wearing a cap distributed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) during their insurgent 2012‐2013 campaign to establish themselves as an alternative political force. I argue this parodic portrait and the text it accrues in its circulations on Facebook functions as a networked image‐event that evinces the impossible contradictions that Somalis face in India. Tracing this networked image event reveals how a surging antiblackness linked to the rise of the AAP Party in Delhi punctuates the in‐betweenness that Somalis experience while they wait for life elsewhere.

Patient perception of attributes of primary care: a study of Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics in Delhi, India.

Aam Aadmi Mohalla Clinics (AAMC) are the community level public primary care facilities recently introduced to strengthen primary care in Delhi, India by bringing affordable healthcare close to home. This study looks at the primary care attributes of AAMC from a patient perspective, to assess their features, strengths and weaknesses. Using a primary care survey tool, a cross-sectional survey of 360 users was conducted at 18 facilities across 9 districts of Delhi to gather information on six dimensions of primary care delivery. Thematic analysis of responses to quantitative, multiple-choice and Likert scale questions using percentage of respondents in each category; and a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and suggestions (SWOS) framework, was used to examine the primary care attributes. AAMCs have done well in improving proximity, availability, physical and financial access to primary care with respondents reporting their residence within 1 kilometre of AAMCs (95%), physician being available (100%), free drugs in stock (99%). Service delivery is however not comprehensive with missing preventive care. Respondents reported missing gatekeeping, weak referral mechanism (6-19%), and low physician's familiarity with their overall health (2%). AAMCs have brought affordable healthcare with free medicines and diagnostics to neighbourhood. There is an opportunity for attaining universal healthcare that is responsive to user needs through provision of comprehensive care. Compulsory enrolment of neighbourhood population with an electronic database of patients has an immense potential to improve longitudinality and coordination of care.

Channelling compassion towards change: elite volunteerism, corporate philanthropy and education reform in urban India

ABSTRACT This article explores how young elite urban professionals and fresh graduates in Mumbai and Delhi are fostering diverse aspirations of service, entrepreneurship and charting new professional mobilities through volunteering opportunities at a well-known corporate-supported non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Teach for India (TFI) programme. Mostly with commerce, engineering and management educational backgrounds, the TFI intervention operates as a nodal site for these elite youth to not just serve underprivileged children through ‘acts of compassion’ but also channel their experiences to understand the education system and reinvigorate it through corporate management values of enterprise and performance. Through examining the trajectories of these individuals, I foreground the nascent terrain of technocratic expertise being shaped through an interlinked collective of corporate NGOs that have become prominent in advising the Delhi state government, under the leadership of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), to improve public education through discourses of enterprise and performance.

Emerging Trends and Influential Factors in the 2022 Punjab State Elections

This study explores the emerging trends and factors that influenced the Punjab Legislative Assembly Elections in 2022, shedding light on the evolving dynamics of electoral politics in India. The research employs a comparative analytical approach, utilizing data from various sources such as published literature, online resources, and databases to examine voter preferences, party strategies, and electoral outcomes. The 2022 elections witnessed an unprecedented victory for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), highlighting the shift in voter priorities towards development, unemployment, health, and sanitation. Key findings include the growing importance of social media and digital campaigns in shaping voter preferences, the increasing significance of women and youth voters in the electoral landscape, and the decline of traditional political forces. These results have crucial implications for the future of Indian politics, emphasizing the need for political parties to address changing voter priorities, engage with digital platforms, and cater to the concerns of women and youth demographics. This study provides valuable insights for political parties seeking to navigate the shifting landscape of the world's largest democracy.

Bypassing the Patronage Trap: Evidence from Delhi Assembly Election 2020

Scholars have long theorized on the limits of patronage politics and the possibility of counter-mobilization it produces against clientelist strategies. Analysing the recent win of the Aam Aadmi Party in the 2020 Assembly election in Delhi, this article shows that programmatic policies of welfare can help parties to circumvent this trap and avoid targeted patronage networks. We find that this broad-based appeal increases the social base of the party to even include those segments of voters who remain aloof to patronage-based exchanges. Additionally, we test the salience of majoritarian issues in the presence of universal welfare. We find that by locating themselves on issue positions of relative advantage, and reducing the ideological distance with their chief competitor, a policy-focussed party may capture not just ideology-agnostic, but also peripheral voters who might be opposed to the other challenger. Using a logistic regression model, we find that policy concerns catapulted AAP to victory, while its ideological distance from the BJP added to this. Our analysis has significance for understanding the underlying changes to patronage-based linkages, especially in the presence of heightened ethnic appeals that increasingly characterizes electoral contexts in the country.

‘We do politics so we can change politics’: communication strategies and practices in the Aam Aadmi Party’s institutionalization process

ABSTRACT This decade has marked a rise in social movement-originating political parties, many of which have gained considerable political power and achieved surprising electoral success. In doing so, these parties have challenged traditional definitions and conceptualizations of party institutionalization. One such party is the Aam Aadmi Party in India, formed in the wake of the massively viral 2011 India Against Corruption (IAC) movement. Through interviews and observations, as well as digital artefact analysis, we trace the process of the Aam Aadmi Party’s institutionalization through an analysis of its media and communication practices. We argue that party workers’ drive to institutionalize into a durable electoral force has pushed AAP into projecting contradictory images and embracing conflicting narratives, both online and offline. However, the durability of the party and recent electoral successes point to the ways AAP can nonetheless inform conceptions of institutionalization.

Decentralisation and urban primary health services: a case study of Delhi’s Mohalla Clinics

The Indian political party Aam Aadmi, which assumed power in the city-state of Delhi in 2015, introduced Mohalla Clinics (i.e. neighbourhood clinics) to provide free primary health services for all, as a response to the rising inaccessibility of primary healthcare facilities for the urban poor. These clinics were to be governed through Mohalla Sabhas (i.e. neighbourhood committees), which are instruments of participatory governance within the neighbourhood. The research compares promises and practice for Mohalla Clinics, especially focusing on governance and the politics surrounding it. The authors find that in their current form Mohalla Clinics are limited to providing primary curative healthcare and have shown limited success, although Mohalla Clinic users do save time and expenditure on primary healthcare, and the clinics have led to a more comprehensive form of primary healthcare than in the past. However, Mohalla Clinics are governed in a top-down fashion by the Government of the National Capital Territory-Delhi, and not by urban local bodies or the envisaged neighbourhood committees. As a result, they face problems that may inhibit their functioning in the long term.

Political Representation in the Discourse and Practices of the “Party of the Common Man” in India

One of the many challenges presented by populism concerns its relationship with political representation. What happens when an anti-politics movement wins elections? This article offers an analysis of the exercise of power by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP, Party of the Common Man), which has been ruling the city-state of Delhi since 2015, in order to bring elements of answer to this question. On the basis of discourse analysis as well as direct observation of meetings, the article first identifies a series of populist tropes in the official discourse of the AAP, including a de-emphasis on representation to the advantage of participation. It then describes the two main participatory schemes implemented by the AAP government since 2015, and shows that these generate, in different ways, a magnification of the mediation work that is central to political representation at the local level in the Indian context. Finally, the article argues that the party has been developing, through these participatory schemes, a form of “inclusive representation” (Hayat, 2013), in which inclusion is linked to mobilization.

Digital Politics in the Diaspora: U.K. Aam Aadmi Party Supporters Online and Offline

In 2012, the Aam Aadmi (common man) Party (AAP) made its debut on the Indian political scene on a platform promoting ethical politics, anticorruption action and active citizenship. Inspired by the AAP’s call to “change politics,” many nonresident Indians (NRIs) in the U.K. Indian diaspora joined an international network of groups that provided support for the party in subsequent successful election campaigns. This article follows the ways in which digital media played a key role in the formation of intense individual attachments to the party, and how, for some, it became the means through which disillusionment with the party and its project was expressed. By attending to digital politics in the Indian diaspora as it plays out in this relatively recent political formation, we can gain a new perspective on the circulations, connections, and class values through which postliberalization projects to reform the nation are worked on from beyond its borders.

An exploratory case study focusing on the creation, and development of a new political brand: The case of Aam Aadmi Party

In the backdrop of India's rising prominence in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), understanding of its political environment, electoral competition, and constituent parties with their political ideologies contesting to form government attracts immense interest from the researchers in political science, political marketing, and public policy. Although literatures in political marketing are more than two decades mostly carried out in developed democratic systems like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, India as a posttransition democracy received relatively less attention. The article has been conceptualized in the context of 2014 Indian general elections Lok Sabha 2014 as an attempt to study application of political marketing principles in a cross‐cultural democracy. The author has probed the emergence of new political party Aam Aadmi Party riding on the success of Janlokpal (civil society movement), the marketing approach used by Aam Aadmi Party, essentially positioning and branding strategies, during the national elections and party institutionalization. Research strategy followed secondary research of published data for examining the new party creation from a marketing perspective.

India’s labour question is also a social question: inequalizing growth and increasing social equality under neoliberal economic regimes

The Indian growth story since its adoption of neoliberal economic reforms in 1991 is indeed a celebrated one especially by the increasingly powerful corporate capitalist lobby and their supporters within India as well as abroad. In fact the high growth performance started from the mid-eighties with limited internal economic reforms has now contributed to a long-term growth rate of 6% per annum for the last three decades. Although this record is excelled by China by a considerable margin over a longer period that in no way diminishes its contemporary significance. What is conspicuous by its absence is any reference to the increasing economic inequality embedded in a pre-existing social inequality and the consequent impact on the vast majority of the people referred to as aam aadmi, or common people, in India. One of the main justifications propounded, and pounded relentlessly, by the official statements and pronouncements as well as by large sections of the powerful media is that the process of high growth and its maintenance will ‘trickle down’ and reduce poverty because it will lift ‘all boats’. Of course, growth did trickle down for some in the literal sense of lifting them out of an officially defined poverty line that has increasingly been challenged while leaving a large majority where they were. Such a process has been called ‘inclusive growth’ because it sought to give them some marginal benefits without any reference to the level or the rate of increase in economic benefits accruing to the non-poor and richer sections.

India’s Aam Aadmi (Common Man’s) Party

The Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party, AAP) has taken over part of the program of the Indian National Congress. The AAP was able to include new solutions within the traditional political repertoire. In Delhi the AAP took over the traditional Congress electorate but was also able to reach out to the middle-class voter.

New Product Development Approach to Political Party Development in India: Study of Aam Aadmi Party

In the backdrop of India’s rising prominence in BRICS, understanding of its political environment, electoral competition, constituent parties with their political ideologies contesting to form government, attracts immense interest from the researchers in political science, political marketing and public policy. While literatures in political marketing are more than two decades (Harrop 1990, Gronroos 1990, Henneberg 1998, Kotler 1999, O’Shaughnessy 2001, Marshment 2001) mostly carried out in developed democratic systems USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand, India as a post transition democracy Heller (2000) received relatively less attention. The article has been conceptualized in the context of 2014 Indian general elections Loksabha 2014 (LS2014) as an attempt to study application of political marketing principles in a cross cultural democracy. The authors have probed the emergence of new political party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) riding on the success of Janlokpal (civil society movement), the marketing approach used by AAP, essentially positioning and branding strategies, during the national elections and party institutionalization. Research strategy followed secondary research of published data (Yin 2009) for examining the new party creation from a marketing perspective.