Recognised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, as the Official Pre-Summit of the AI Impact Summit 2026, the Public Health Transformation Summit 2026 convened India’s public health leadership at a decisive moment. On a crisp January morning at the C. D. Deshmukh Auditorium, India International Centre, the country’s public health establishment, gathered not to celebrate what has been, but to dismantle what no longer works. The Summit crystallized a truth that has been building for years: public health in India can no longer remain a cautious, marginalized function. It must be revolutionary.
More than 250 delegates, policy makers, researchers, practitioners, young public health professionals, and changemakers came together around a singular conviction: that India stands at a defining moment where the way we define, deliver, and measure public health will change forever. By day’s end, they had walked away not just with insights, but with concrete blueprints: a Public Health Monitor for India, a Draft Planetary Health Policy Framework, and a reimagined digital public health curriculum designed to create a new generation of leaders fluent in both epidemiology and technology. Contributing to professional development, participating nursing professionals earned 5 CNE hours (1 CNE credit).
The Summit also saw the participation of senior diplomats and representatives from multiple foreign missions, reflecting the growing international engagement with India’s public health discourse. Official representations were present from the France, Indonesia, Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Republic of Iraq, Republic of Chad, Republic of Lithuania, Republic of Guinea, Republic of Togo, People’s Republic of China, Republic of Benin, and the Jamaican High Commission, underscoring the Summit’s role as a platform for cross-regional dialogue on public health priorities and cooperation.
The summit’s opening framing was deliberate and provocative, urging participants to look beyond the last 400 years, to remember that long before John Snow and the Broad Street cholera pump, ancient India was building sophisticated drainage systems in Mohenjo-Daro and the Charak Samhita was teaching about “Janapadodhwansa,” the devastation of towns. The idea was to underscore how much of our own deep history of thinking about collective health has been forgotten, and to signal that this is a moment not only to remember that legacy, but to reimagine public health through it.
Opening the debate: “We cannot afford another century of incremental change”
Prof. K. Srinath Reddy, Founding President of the Public Health Foundation of India, set the intellectual temperature in the opening session, “Public Health: From Evolution to Revolution.” His message didn’t traffic in comforting narratives. Instead, Prof. Reddy articulated a systemic diagnosis: that India’s public health infrastructure, despite pockets of excellence, remains fundamentally misaligned with 21st-century challenges. “If Clinical medicine delivers health in retail, then Public Health delivers health in wholesale,” he declared.
Building on this framing, Dr. Rajendra Pratap Gupta, Founder and Chairman of Health Parliament and Summit Co-Chair, widened the lens to the broader ecosystem that shapes public health outcomes. “ Public Health needs to integrate digital, if it has to scale and we need to create a pipeline of future leaders who will lead this revolution & that remains the biggest challenge for public health”.
This wasn’t academic theorizing. The morning’s panel on “State of Public Health in India” brought five voices who collectively painted a portrait of a field at an inflection point, with both critical gaps and untapped potential.
Dr. Narendra Kumar Arora, Executive Director of The INCLEN Trust International and India’s leading public health researcher, brought epidemiological rigour to the conversation. “We need to move forward in a way that is evidence-based and not on assumptions,” Arora noted.
Mathew Cherian, Chairperson of CARE India and former CEO of HelpAge India, addressed the need to improve geriatric healthcare. “If we provide age-friendly healthcare, then all of us in this room can live to be 100 years,” Cherian reflected.
Dr. Harish Iyer, Director of Health R&D, Digital Innovations & AI at the Gates Foundation, brought the voice of those trying to bridge innovation and implementation. “Technology can be deeply enabling. How do you make this enabling in the public health system is the challenge, and figuring out how to make it interoperable.”
Perhaps most striking was Dr. Girish N. Rao, Principal Investigator of the National Mental Health Survey and Professor of Epidemiology at NIMHANS, who brought an uncomfortable spotlight to public health’s blind spots. “We are conveniently forgetting that there is no health without mental health, and this is not just an average or a mere slogan. Mental health is everybody’s business. The stress and the distress in the different disorders are now more evident than ever.” His presence in the panel signalled that reimagined public health cannot afford siloed thinking. Mental health is not a niche. It is foundational.
Mevish P. Vaishnav, President of Health Parliament, wove these disparate threads into a challenging synthesis. “Public Health is not just about hospitals and diseases. It is the condition in which people live—the air, water, food, mental well-being, ageing, and the systems that protect us or fail to protect us.”
National leadership signals a rights-driven, digitally enabled public health future
In a powerful keynote, Dr. Vinod K. Paul, Member (Health), NITI Aayog, framed public health as the backbone of India’s journey to Viksit Bharat by 2047, not a side agenda to be funded after everything else. Drawing on his experience steering national health reforms, he underlined that, “We collect a lot of data, but one of the major problems today is too many portals. Data is lying out there and is not being used in a serious manner. Data is only useful when you use it; when you store it, it has no value. Unless data is connected, interoperable, and actually used for planning, programming, and action, it does not serve its purpose.”
Bringing a rights-based lens to the summit, Bharat Lal, Secretary General, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), reminded the audience that health is not a service to be delivered at convenience, but a fundamental right that must be protected with urgency. Echoing his long-standing advocacy, he stressed, “We have to understand that in a country like ours, with 1.46 billion people, it is not possible to manage healthcare only through treatment by creating infrastructure and human resources. So preventive healthcare through this approach is very important.”
Delivering a forward-looking address, Dr. Sunil Kumar Barnwal, CEO, National Health Authority (NHA), situated digital public health at the centre of India’s transformation, while warning against technology divorced from ethics and evidence. Reflecting on the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, he noted, “If we really want to build Viksit Bharat by 2047, we need to be a healthy Bharat, and a healthy Bharat will exist if we really promote integrated healthcare with many more technological solutions to better prepare the population for preventive and promotive healthcare.”
Adding a critical gender and equity perspective to the national dialogue, the Chief Guest, Vijaya K. Rahatkar, Chairperson, National Commission for Women (NCW), underscored that public health transformation cannot be achieved without centering women’s rights, safety, and access across the life course. She highlighted how health systems often overlook the intersecting vulnerabilities faced by women and girls. Emphasizing the role of institutions and policy in correcting these gaps, she observed that, “भारत केवल बीमारियों से नहीं लड़ रहा है, भारत स्वास्थ्य की एक नई व्यवस्था बना रहा है, और इस परिवर्तन के केंद्र में भारत की नारी शक्ति खड़ी है।”.
The public health monitor: From invisibility to accountability
Mid-morning brought the session that many participants would later call the summit’s most concrete deliverable, “Building a Public Health Monitor for India.” This was not a theoretical exercise. Led by Prof. K. Srinath Reddy, Dr. Rajendra Pratap Gupta (Founder & Chairman of Health Parliament), and Dr. K. Madan Gopal (Advisor & Head, Public Health Administration, National Health Systems Resource Centre), this discussion introduced a systematic, transparent, real-time measurement framework designed to track not just health outcomes across India’s states and union territories, but the public health system’s actual capacity to deliver.
Dr. K. Madan Gopal, whose work inspired the ASHA program one of India’s most successful grassroots public health interventions—brought lived experience of how measurement shapes strategy.
“One of the important challenges is understanding the data—what to collect and what is the importance of the data; that part of capacity is currently missing.”
Prof. K. Srinath Reddy reflected on why a public health monitor must go beyond conventional metrics, emphasizing the risk of reducing health systems to what is easiest to quantify rather than what is most consequential. “What is not easy to measure does not get measured, even if it is important. And therefore, what gets measured gets repetitively incorporated; that gets into policy, that gets into programs.”
The session crystallized a principle that would be invoked repeatedly: You cannot manage what you do not measure. And you cannot transform what remains invisible.
Planetary health and one health: Expanding the circle of care
By noon, the summit’s frame had expanded radically. The session “From One Health to Planetary Health” unveiled India’s Draft Planetary Health Policy Framework, a document that signals a fundamental reorientation of what “public health” actually means in an era of climate crisis, zoonotic disease spillover, and ecological collapse.
Rajit Punhani, IAS, Chief Executive Officer of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, brought the regulatory-systems lens. “Eat Right India has three components—safe food, healthy food, and sustainable food. What is grown depends on consumer demand. What we see today is that unhealthy food is cheaper and healthy food has become expensive. We need to change this paradigm.”. Punhani’s framing suggested a radical integration that we cannot talk about planetary health unless we are willing to transform our food systems. That requires coordination between health, agriculture, environment, and trade, conversations that almost never happen at the same table.
Dr. Sunita Narain, Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment and Editor of Down To Earth magazine, brought an unsparing climate reality into the room. Her presence, a climate scientist, not a health bureaucrat, was itself a statement. “Nobody is safe till everybody is safe.”
Brigadier Jyothikumar S. Dharamadheeran, Country Director and CEO of Brooke India, highlighted animal health as an important yet often overlooked component of the broader health discourse. “One Health is a concept that has been recognised at the highest levels of leadership in this country. Public health is what actually implements this concept on the ground.” He emphasised on animal welfare as a public health lever, and preventing disease at source.
Dr. Rajiv Kumar Jain, Chair of the Scientific Committee on Education and Training in Occupational Health (SCETOH), brought to light the need of the hour. “We must create evidence first — only then can leadership and policy follow. Public health transformation cannot happen without evidence generation.”
Digital public health: From innovation hype to equity reality
The post-lunch session on “Transitioning to Digital Public Health” was the summit’s most forward-looking moment.
Dr. Krishnan Ganapathy, Past President of the Telemedicine Society of India and Emeritus Professor at the National Academy of Medical Sciences, brought two decades of experience deploying telemedicine across rural India. “Unlearning and relearning, in my opinion, is far more important than learning. Doctors today are not pre-AI or post-AI—we are living in the AI era.”
Dr. Indu Bhushan, Ex-CEO of the National Health Authority and former director of the Asian Development Bank, spoke to the capital and systems infrastructure required to scale digital health. “Anything that needs to be done at scale for large populations, digital is unavoidable.”
Gopi Gopalakrishnan, Founder & President of World Health Partners, brought the practitioner’s voice. “Any system that does not have a self-correcting mechanism is doomed to failure.”
Career, purpose, and power: Who gets to shape public health?
The afternoon’s “Building a Rewarding Career in Public Health” session tackled an uncomfortable truth: that public health in India has become a second-choice profession, attracting idealists while haemorrhaging talented professionals to clinical medicine and private sector opportunities.
Dr. R.K. Srivastava, Former Chairman of the Medical Council of India and Former Director General of Health Services, mentioned that “Solutions from public health experts are only possible when young boys and girls are involved.”
Dr. Sivaranjani Santosh, Senior Paediatrician and Social Activist, brought a different kind of power. Her story, standing up to fake ORS products, protecting children, working with systems that often fought her rather than supported her, was not about career progression. It was about choosing to act regardless of credentials or permission. “There are many regulatory loopholes, and these loopholes can be exploited by people with vested interests. So you, and only you, can remind the systems of what they are built for.” Her presence reframed the conversation from “How do I build a career in public health?” to “What am I willing to risk for public health?”
Big pharma in public health: Moving beyond defensiveness to accountability
Perhaps the summit’s most provocative session, “Big Pharma in Public Health,” brought together an unusual alliance of industry veterans, mental health leaders, regulators, and investigative journalists, all circling the question: How can pharmaceutical innovation serve public health without colonizing it?
Annaswamy Vaidheesh, Former Executive Chairperson of Suven Pharmaceuticals and Former Managing Director of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Pharmaceuticals, brought a candid insider perspective. “The question is not whether pharma is doing good. The question is whether it is also seen to be doing good, and whether that is backed by outcome-based public health data.”
Representing the perspective of a global innovator operating within India’s evolving public health landscape, Praveen Akkinepally, Country President and Managing Director, AstraZeneca India, addressed the responsibility that accompanies scale, science, and market leadership. He spoke to the need for pharmaceutical companies to move beyond transactional engagement with health systems and invest in long-term outcomes.
He reflected that, “Public health is a constant process. You never reach perfection, and that is just the way it works.”
Prof. (Dr.) Nimesh G. Desai, Former Director of the Institute of Human Behaviour & Allied Sciences (IHBAS), brought the mental health lens, arguably where pharma’s contradictions are most visible. “The real question is whether the human race, caught between public health and commerce, will be able to strike that golden balance between pharma science and public welfare.”
Ravi Uday Bhaskar, Director-General of the All India Drugs Control Officers’ Confederation (AIDCOC), brought the regulatory voice, one often caught between industry pressure and public protection. “The average spending of Indian pharma on research and innovation is only 4–7%, while globally it is around 15%. Pharmaceutical companies must look beyond profits and place public interest above everything else.” Bhaskar’s call for empowered, fairly-resourced regulation reflected a broader summit insight that institutional strength matters as much as individual heroism.
Viveka Roychowdhury, Editor, Express Pharma, Express Healthcare, and Express Nutra at The Indian Express, brought an accountability-driven journalism perspective. “Pharma is arguably one of the biggest influencers in health ecosystems, given their financial clout. But do they build this influence with responsibility and accountability? Accountability cannot exist without participation, and leadership requires the willingness to engage with difficult questions.”
The open mic: Unscripted voices from the frontlines
The final hour’s “Open Mic” session proved to be one of the most powerful moments. Young public health researchers, state health administrators, community health workers, and NGO leaders brought unfiltered voices about real constraints, innovations, and frustrations. The insights ranged from supply chain procurement bottlenecks that delay vaccine delivery, to the critical role of female frontline workers in disease surveillance, to calls for genuine co-design of public health interventions with the communities they serve.
This democratic moment underscored what the Health Parliament had signalled before the summit that Public health transformation cannot be top-down. It requires the voices, insights, and lived experience of those executing public health every day, not just policymakers in the nation.
What this summit means: A turning point
As Mevish P. Vaishnav, President of Health Parliament, delivered the vote of thanks, she positioned the summit not as a culmination but as a launching pad.
The Public Health Transformation Summit arrived at a moment when India’s public health establishment is grappling with a fundamental identity crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in disease surveillance and emergency preparedness.
The epidemiological transition, with non-communicable diseases now driving disease burden, has made clear that yesterday’s public health architecture cannot address today’s challenges. And a new generation of leaders is demanding that public health be reframed as essential infrastructure, not a charitable afterthought.
The summit also touched something deeper, returning to India’s own intellectual heritage on public and collective health. As framed by Health Parliament, by looking beyond the last 400 years to ancient India’s sophisticated understanding of water, sanitation, and the social determinants of health, contemporary leaders can reclaim a lineage of thinking about collective welfare that predates biomedicine by millennia. This was not nostalgia. It offered intellectual space to reimagine public health as a central pillar of societal resilience and long-term well-being.
What comes next: From vision to execution
As delegates left the C. D. Deshmukh Auditorium on January 16th evening, they carried with them not just insights, but commitments. Partnerships forged in informal conversations will likely reshape how states approach health planning.
For India’s public health ecosystem, January 16, 2026, will likely be remembered as the day the conversation shifted fundamentally. It was the day when India’s most influential health leaders gathered not to celebrate what public health has been, but to collectively architect what it must become.
The real test, however, will come in the months and years ahead. Will governments allocate budgets commensurate with the vision outlined? Will academic institutions genuinely integrate digital thinking into public health education? Will pharma move beyond corporate responsibility rhetoric to structural change? Will regulatory frameworks be strengthened? Will young people see careers in public health as pathways to impact rather than consolation prizes?
The summit’s true measure will be in the policies that change, the investments that flow, the careers that are built, and ultimately, in the health outcomes of communities across India who benefit from a public health system finally positioned as the urgent, technology-enabled, equity-focused discipline the 21st century demands.
As Dr. Gupta told delegates at the close: “Today, at the Public Health Transformation Summit 2026, leaders came from diverse fields for a frank discourse on public health. Now the real work begins, together, we must turn this conversation into action and transform public health.”