The combination of the public facility survey, a private facility survey, and the household survey casts light on the state of public and private health care provision in Udaipur district and its place in people’s lives. The picture is bleak. Starting with the public health facility surveys, the weekly absenteeism survey reveals that, on average, 45 percent of medical personnel are absent in subcenters and aid posts, and 36 percent are absent in the (larger) primary health centers and community health centers.2 These high rates of absences are not due to staff attending patients; whenever the nurse was absent from a subcenter, we made sure to look for her in the community. Since subcenters are often staffed by only one nurse, this high absenteeism means that these facilities are often closed: we found the subcenters closed 56 percent of the time during regular opening hours. Only in 12 percent of the cases was the nurse to be found in one of the villages served by her subcenter. The situation does not seem to be specific to Udaipur: these results are similar to the absenteeism rate found in nationally representative surveys in India and Bangladesh (Nazmul Chaudhury and Jeffrey Hammer, 2003; Chaudhuty et al., 2003).