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The COVID-19 pandemic has posed threats to human life across the globe, including India. Vaccinating is an effective means of addressing the pandemic threat. The government of India has implemented a massive vaccination drive to save its citizens from the deadly virus. However, the effort has faced multiple challenges, including vaccine hesitancy. This research understands respondents' perspectives on factors contributing to the lower vaccination uptake in Gujarat, India. Forty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted through convenience sampling representing different demographic backgrounds. Factors influencing vaccine adoption included religious leadership, political leadership and the government, and fear of side effects, especially among children and those with co-morbidities, resulting primarily from fake news and misinformation circulated through social media. Compared with nine countries from across the world, the study found similarities to vaccine hesitancy from misinformation and the fear of side effects among children. In contrast, the role of government and the influence of religious and political leaders was considered positive. The study recommends strategies to overcome people's apprehensions about the adoption of vaccination. These include offering incentives, providing positive peer-to-peer communication, recruiting influencers such as religious and community leaders and early adopters such as the elderly population to endorse vaccination, targeting youth through social media, and reaching rural sections by involving NGOs and social service groups.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed threats to human life across the globe, including India. Vaccinating is an effective means of addressing the pandemic threat. The government of India has implemented a massive vaccination drive to save its citizens from the deadly virus. However, the effort has faced multiple challenges, including vaccine hesitancy. This research understands respondents' perspectives on factors contributing to the lower vaccination uptake in Gujarat, India. Forty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted through convenience sampling representing different demographic backgrounds. Factors influencing vaccine adoption included religious leadership, political leadership and the government, and fear of side effects, especially among children and those with co-morbidities, resulting primarily from fake news and misinformation circulated through social media. Compared with nine countries from across the world, the study found similarities to vaccine hesitancy from misinformation and the fear of side effects among children. In contrast, the role of government and the influence of religious and political leaders was considered positive. The study recommends strategies to overcome people's apprehensions about the adoption of vaccination. These include offering incentives, providing positive peer-to-peer communication, recruiting influencers such as religious and community leaders and early adopters such as the elderly population to endorse vaccination, targeting youth through social media, and reaching rural sections by involving NGOs and social service groups.

BACKGROUND India faces a critical shortage of government doctors in rural and underserved areas. Several measures have been introduced to address the shortage, but significant problems still remain. The main aim of the current research was to understand the existing recruitment-related policies and systems in place for government doctors in Gujarat and to identify issues that prevent effective recruitment of doctors that could have implications for doctors' shortage in the state. The research also aims to fill the knowledge gap in the existing literature on why recruitment in civil services is an important HR function to address the shortage of doctors. METHODS The study aimed at identifying the existing recruitment policies and practices for government Medical Officers (MOs) from Gujarat state in India. The analysis is based on document review to understand the existing policies, 19 in-depth interviews with MOs to understand the systems in place for recruitment of MOs, construction of job histories from interviews to understand various nuances in the recruitment system and five interviews with Key Informants to understand recruitment policies and their actual implementation. Thematic framework approach was used to analyse qualitative data using NVivo. RESULTS While the state has general recruitment guidelines called the Recruitment Rules (RRs), these rules are very wide-ranging and fragmented. The MOs were neither briefed about them nor received copies of the rules at any time during the service suggesting that RRs were not transparent. The recruitment system was considered to be slow and very sporadic having possible implications for attraction and retention of MOs. The study results indicate several other system inefficiencies such as a long time taken by the health department to provide salary benefits and service regularization that has a negative effect over MOs' motivation. The study also found unequal opportunities presented to different categories of MOs in relation to job security, salary benefits and in recognizing their previous work experience leaving MOs unclear about their future thereby influencing the attraction and retention of MOs to government jobs negatively. CONCLUSIONS If long-term solutions are to be sought, the health department needs to have an effective recruitment system in place with the aim to (1) address the slow and sporadic nature of the recruitment system (that is likely to attract more doctors and prevent loss of any doctors during recruitment) and (2) address the job insecurity issue that MOs have which also influences their other employment benefits such as salary, pension and recognition for the years of service they have given to the health department. Addressing these issues can improve motivation among doctors and prevent loss of doctors through voluntary turnover leading to better retention.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

ABSTRACTThis article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the outcome of a dialectic between the limited capacity of the state to provide public services and the strategies that local politicians employ to win elections.

The aim of this study was to determine hematological profile of sickle cell disease (SCD) from Surat, South Gujarat, India. This prospective cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Pediatrics and Sickle Cell Anemia Laboratory, Faculty of Pathology, Government Medical College, Surat, India, between July 2009 and December 2010. Patients included in this study were in their steady state for a long period of time without any symptoms related to SCD or other diseases which could affect the hematological parameters. Venous blood of all patients was collected in ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid and hematological indices were measured. Thirty-three subjects homozygous in all were studied for their hematological parameters for sickle cell anemia. Moderate to severe anemia, low mean cell volume and high foetal hemoglobin dominate the hematological profile of SCD children.

The aim of this study was to determine hematological profile of sickle cell disease (SCD) from Surat, South Gujarat, India. This prospective cross-sectional study was conducted in the Department of Pediatrics and Sickle Cell Anemia Laboratory, Faculty of Pathology, Government Medical College, Surat, India, between July 2009 and December 2010. Patients included in this study were in their steady state for a long period of time without any symptoms related to SCD or other diseases which could affect the hematological parameters. Venous blood of all patients was collected in ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid and hematological indices were measured. Thirty-three subjects homozygous in all were studied for their hematological parameters for sickle cell anemia. Moderate to severe anemia, low mean cell volume and high foetal hemoglobin dominate the hematological profile of SCD children.

Comparative findings from girls' education projects in Gujarat, India, and Shaanxi, China, are used to explore two questions: How and under what conditions does schooling contribute to girls' instrumental and intrinsic empowerment? What does it mean to become an educated rural girl in contexts where girls are marginalized? A review of scholarship on empowerment, and the role of schools in enabling that process, is followed by an examination of the school/empowerment link in the case study projects, which to varying degrees have succeeded in assisting girls to gain resources, capabilities, experiences, and networks that expand the lenses through which they see themselves and their authority in the world. Three intertwining processes that affect schooling's potential to enable girls' empowerment include: 1.) expanding educational access and opportunities; 2.) declining cultures and economies of son preference; and 3.) shifting levels of "trust" in schools as a critical "good" for girls' futures. Our designation of participating girls as "millennials" refers both to the era in which they are coming of age, and to how their capabilities, aspirations, and identifications as schoolgirls, daughters, and laborers have been shaped by global, national, and local reinterpretations of the world's Millennium Development Goals.