While India continues to grapple with several public health challenges, it also has witnessed several efforts broadly by civil society actors in actively intervening and addressing some of these challenges. These interventions include addressing issues of community at large (such as access to care, water, sanitation, vaccination), specific groups (such as children, women, people with disability, people living with HIV/AIDS), and those that are directed at the district-state- national administration or actors in policy making at the national or international levels. Various thought-out strategies are part of such interventions, and they vary depending on the focus, level, and context of these interventions. What do we learn from these interventions? What drives a particular intervention idea and modality? What is the theory of change that is evident in these interventions? While students would have been exposed to community-based health
interventions during their inter-semester I, the objective of which has focused on understanding comprehensive primary health care and ways of operationalizing the same including appreciating the challenges, in this course, students will study and analyse a range of civil society interventions that have sought to address some of the core public health concerns through direct intervention in health care (e.g.: boat clinic in Assam), organised efforts at the community level on building community health, social accountability initiatives to demand right to health care, addressing the determinants of health or even efforts during pandemic like the recent COVID19.  The objective is to understand the entire trajectory of what-why-how-what next and to draw lessons from the historical trajectory of such interventions so that students develop an in-depth understanding of how to imagine an intervention.