Health: a sovereign-capability programme.
An ambitious country needs a public-health system that holds under stress — pandemic, antimicrobial resistance, climate-driven disease, mass-casualty events. The Health sector programme is how we build that floor, district by district.
Why health is a sovereignty question.
Most of the conversation about Indian health is framed in terms of access and affordability. Both matter. But neither is sufficient if the underlying capability — the labs, the manufacturing base, the workforce, the data spine, the cold chain — depends on imports we cannot guarantee in a crisis.
Sovereignty here doesn't mean autarky. It means knowing, for every critical capability, where the supply comes from, what the failure modes are, and what the fallback plan is — and being able to stand the capability up domestically within a defensible timeline if we have to.
"Resilience is built when the next crisis is still two years away. Not on the day it arrives."
The work, broken into pieces that can actually ship.
Each programme runs on a five-year horizon and ends with capability transferred to a partner institution.
01 · Biosecurity & outbreak readiness
Genomic surveillance at port, district, and zoonotic-interface scale. Standing capacity to type, sequence, and report a novel pathogen inside seven days of first signal — without waiting for a foreign reference lab.
02 · Primary-care strengthening
The block-level PHC is the load-bearing tier. We work on diagnostic kits, structured-care protocols, ASHA-worker tooling, and a digital spine that doesn't break when the network does.
03 · Supply-chain sovereignty
A live capability map for the active pharmaceutical ingredients, reagents, vaccines, and devices we cannot afford to lose access to. For each: a domestic-manufacture pathway and a stress-tested fallback.
04 · Digital public infrastructure for health
ABDM-aligned tooling that respects consent, works offline, and is free for state-government use. Reference implementations published in the open so they can be audited and extended.
Active workstreams and where they're headed.
| Workstream | Stage | Partner type | Next milestone |
|---|---|---|---|
| District-level genomic surveillance pilot | Pilot prep | State health department + ICMR-affiliated lab | Site selection & protocol freeze · Q3 2026 |
| Offline-first ASHA-worker tooling | Field beta | State health mission | Block-wide rollout & field-note publication · Q4 2026 |
| Critical API supply-chain map (open dataset) | Data collection | Industry association + academic group | v0.1 dataset publication · Q3 2026 |
| Cold-chain integrity sensor kit | Lab prototype | State immunisation programme | Field trial in 20 PHCs · Q1 2027 |
| AMR stewardship dashboard | Discovery | Tertiary-care hospital network | Co-design workshop · Q3 2026 |
Honest caveat — this page is a public roadmap. Programmes shift as we learn. We commit to publishing field notes after each pilot, including the ones that don't work.
The non-negotiables we hold the team to.
Health is unforgiving — software failures cost lives, and procurement failures cost decades. We work with that knowledge from day one.
- Pilots run with a public partner, not on their behalf.
- No patient-identifiable data leaves the partner's perimeter.
- Every dataset we collect has a published consent & access policy.
- Code that touches clinical workflow is independently audited.
- Capability transfer is the exit, not a sale.
- We publish field notes — wins and failures — within 60 days of pilot end.
The unresolved problems shaping the next year.
If you have lived expertise on any of these, we want to hear from you.
Genomic readiness in tier-3 districts
How do we keep a sequencing capability alive in a district that sees a novel pathogen once every five years?
The PHC data spine, offline
What's the right primitive for a digital health record that survives 10-day power outages and federates upward when the network returns?
API supply-chain telemetry
Can we build a live, public map of single-source dependencies without violating commercial confidentiality?
AMR data from private hospitals
Most resistance signals live in private-network labs. What's the contract that gets that data into a public stewardship view?
Procurement risk, openly
What does an honest "supply-chain risk register" for a state health department look like — one that survives a ministerial change?
Workforce, not just tools
How do we train the next 10,000 epidemiologists, microbiologists, and bio-informaticians India will need in the 2030s?
If you run a state health programme, a public lab, or a hospital network — let's talk.
We're particularly interested in district health offices, ICMR-affiliated institutions, state health technology cells, and clinician-led teams working on operational problems no vendor will touch.