While the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated attention to the public health challenges of our times, many of these concerns are certainly not new. There are multiple public health concerns including the rising burden of non-communicable diseases, health risks due to environmental degradation and climate change, and re-emergence of several communicable diseases. Responses to these challenges, including educational responses, have often been reductionist and hence found to be inadequate. There has been an increasing global recognition of the need for transformative education to address the complex health challenges of the 21^st century. In this article, we discuss one such effort in designing a public health education programme in India that echoes the sentiment of transformative learning that is contextual, competency-driven, trans disciplinary, reflective, and collaborative. We discuss how these aspects of learning were reflected and considered through a series of internal deliberations within the university and external consultations with different stakeholders. This process involved examining existing gaps in public health education, articulating the core competencies, developing the curriculum, and envisaging students’ contribution to public health practice in India.

Authors:

Arima Mishra, Adithya Pradyumna, Mukta Gundi, Edward Premdas Pinto and Prasanna Saligram

Poverty in India has been defined and measured in several different ways over the years. This report presents a unique way to measure rural poverty in Chhattisgarh using data from the Mission Antyodaya Survey of 2019. We construct a rural multidimensional deprivation index (RDI), composed of indicators in the areas of infrastructure, health and education. The index can be decomposed into its different sub-components to understand which of the indicators contribute the most to deprivation and can be analysed at different levels, starting from the block to the taluka, district and state level. From a policy and public action perspective, the RDI is extremely useful because it is composed of public provisioning of amenities at the village level. A high RDI reflects lack of access to public amenities and deprivation in villages. Because India has a decentralised structure where the Panchayats are responsible for taking governance at the grassroot levels.  Results from this report can be extremely useful to these institutions as they can identify which villages need provisioning of what amenities and act accordingly.

Editors: Sandhya Krishnan, Prasanna S, Sanket Gharat, Puja Guha, Amalendu Jyotishi, and Neeraj Hatekar.