From Alma-Ata to Rio: health for all to all for equity.

a Society for Community Health Awareness, Research and Action (SOCHARA), Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Correspondence to Ravi Narayan (email: [email protected]) The WHO South-East Asia Region was one of the crucibles for development of the primary health care (PHC) concept. The Bandung Conference on Rural Hygiene held in 1937 drew global attention, through the League of Nations Health Organization, to the health needs of the poor rural populations.1 The first primary health units were started in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Mysore state of Southern India in 1929. The Government of India established Health Survey and Development Committee (Bhore Committee) in 1946, identified access to safe water, sanitation, housing and adequate nutrition as essential conditions for healthy living with a curative-preventive mix of services available irrespective of the ability to pay, and emphasized intersectoral actions.2 Subsequently, primary health centres developed in several countries to reach the rural and marginalized populations. In Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand several communitybased primary health care experiments by civil society organizations complemented the primary health care system development by the State. These advances made significant contribution to the development of primary health care (PHC) as an approach to health system strengthening.3