The Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System is an ambitious, cross-sectoral initiative to lay out the path to universal health coverage in India. Its guiding principle is that structural change toward universal health coverage can only be achieved through consultative and participatory engagement with the diverse sectors involved in healthcare and, most importantly, with India’s citizenry.
This event aimed to introduce the Commission to the Harvard community and invite students, researchers, faculty, and alumni to participate in the initiative. It consisted of a panel discussion featuring several of the Commission’s co-chairs and commissioners, who are leading voices from across India’s healthcare landscape. They discussed the Commission’s five work streams (citizens’ engagement, financing, governance, human resources, and technology) and ways to get involved.
By Keya Lamba and Shweta Bahri, Harvard College ‘20. Earth Warriors is an early childhood education curriculum that uses play-based learning and a solutions-oriented approach to teach young children (3-7 years old) about climate change and sustainability. Climate change, pollution, and unsustainable levels of waste have led to an environmental crisis that can no longer be denied, and it is crucial for people to start building sustainable habits and reducing waste production from a young age to combat it. Yet, less than five countries in the world have climate change as part of their mandatory education curriculum, and none have it as part of their early curriculum.
In the third episode of The COVID Chronicles podcast, Dr. Satchit Balsari speaks with Manoj Mohanan, Associate Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Mohanan’s team’s recent paper, published in Lancet Global Health, reports that seroprevalence (the number of individuals in a population who test positive for a specific disease based on serology specimens) in Mumbai varies from 55–61% in the slums, to 12–19% in non-slum settings.
In the second episode of The COVID Chronicles podcast, Dr. Satchit Balsari speaks with Enakshi Ganguly, child rights activist and the co-founder of HAQ: Centre for Child Rights. In July 2020, Ganguly was part of the 11-member expert committee set up by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on human rights, especially those of marginalized and vulnerable sections of the society. Ganguly led the discussion related to the advisory on the rights of children.
The profound and inspirational work of our artists has not stopped despite the COVID-19 pandemic. In this magazine, we spoke with each of our fellows to discuss the inspiration behind their career as an artist, what they hope to learn during their time as a Visiting Artist Fellow, and their thoughts on the artwork they have each presented in this magazine. In the magazine’s pages, you will read the artists’ thoughts on these subjects in their own words, and we hope that it will inspire you to enter their world and see their work through their eyes.
The Mittal Institute’s annual Seed for Change (SFC) competition aims to develop a vibrant ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in India and Pakistan, offering grant prizes to interdisciplinary student projects that have the potential to positively impact societal, economic, and environmental issues in India and Pakistan. We recently spoke with a few of our past winners of the SFC competition — the teams of Umbulizer, Gramhal, and Meet — to learn how their social enterprise initiatives in Pakistan and India have grown since the time they one.
The India In-Focus podcast is back with a special mini-series, “The COVID Chronicles,” which examines the science, policy, and societal response to COVID-19 pandemic in India. Over the course of this seven-part series as we count down to the one-year mark of the nationwide lockdown in India, our host Dr. Satchit Balsari, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, speaks with experts across numerous industries. In each episode, Dr. Balsari explores with his guests the key issues surrounding India’s response to the pandemic and the challenges that lie ahead.
Through the Mittal Institute’s 2020 Seed for Change Exploratory Grant program, recipients Sahana Bail and Kanishk Mittal set out to create a preventive COVID-19 health education program in India. Their three goals are to educate students of the program about the benefits and logistics of proper mask use and hand hygiene, early recognition of COVID-19 symptoms and what to do if a child has it, and bust the myths related to the intersection of food and COVID-19.
Each year, the Mittal Institute’s B4 Program hosts workshops that bring together talented Indian students and experts in the life sciences. The goal of these workshops is to introduce students to important issues in the life sciences through lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on learning opportunities. From March 14–21, 2021, the B4 Program will host a 7-day course, “Online Workshop on Big Data in Life Sciences and Healthcare,” organized by IBAB, Bangalore under the aegis of the Building Bharat-Boston Biosciences (B4) Program funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. Learn more and apply by March 2, 2021.
“As human health is increasingly threatened by emerging pathogens, multi-drug-resistant infections, and therapy-evading cancer cells, our understanding of the dynamics of evolution is of growing importance,” writes the research team of Ramya Purkanti, one of the Mittal Institute’s 2016–2017 B4 Fellows.
View a virtual gallery of the artwork from our 13 2020-2021 Visiting Artist Fellows from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal.