Rural households in India rely extensively on informal biomedical providers, who lack valid
medical qualifications. Their numbers far exceed those of formal providers. Our study reports
on the education, knowledge, practices and relationships of informal providers (IPs) in two
very different districts: Tehri Garhwal in Uttarakhand (north) and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh
(south). We mapped and interviewed IPs in all nine blocks of Tehri and in nine out of 57
blocks in Guntur, and then interviewed a smaller sample in depth (90 IPs in Tehri, 100 in …

Rural households in India rely extensively on informal biomedical providers, who lack valid
medical qualifications. Their numbers far exceed those of formal providers. Our study reports
on the education, knowledge, practices and relationships of informal providers (IPs) in two
very different districts: Tehri Garhwal in Uttarakhand (north) and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh
(south). We mapped and interviewed IPs in all nine blocks of Tehri and in nine out of 57
blocks in Guntur, and then interviewed a smaller sample in depth (90 IPs in Tehri, 100 in …