Welcome to Human Resources for Health in India Website!

The responsibility of delivering health services falls primarily on health workers making them central to the health systems’ capacity to deliver health services. The health sector in India faces several challenges in human resources for health. At one level, information on the size, composition and distribution of the health workforce is limited and fragmented. The lack of health workers, doctors, female doctors in underserved areas is a cause for concern. Though the public sector has made serious efforts to place qualified health workers in under-served areas, institutional constraints in the production and recruitment of health workers pose their own challenges.

This website presents a series of studies on human resources for health in India conducted by the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and the World Bank, New Delhi. These studies together attempt to better understand the human resource challenges facing the health sector and cover diverse areas in human resources for health. The first study estimates the size, composition and distribution of India’s health workforce using multiple sources of data. The second study provides an institutional analysis of human resources for health and examines the constraints to the recruitment of doctors and nurses in the public sector. The third study provides a qualitative examination of the determinants of employment choice among graduating medical and nursing students and aims to better understand under what incentives health workers will serve in rural areas.