What caused India's massive community health workers scheme: a sociology of knowledge.

A program to train Community Health Workers was initiated in India in 1977 using a rhetoric that referred to claims for the success of health policies in China. This paper considers conflicting interpretations of the program at the time when it was implemented, its failure to use the extensive institutional structure of indigenous medicine, and the failure of those who planned and evaluated the program to utilize the substantial body of ethnographic work on medical practices and traditions in South Asia.