The Global Alliance for Medical Innovation, a group of students and faculty based at
Harvard University working to increase access to healthcare via engineering and advocacy, was awarded a Mittal Institute Seed for Change grant in summer 2020. Their proposal explored the development of low-cost, scalable technologies to allow point-of-care diagnosis of common eye disorders in under-resourced regions of the globe.
Through a collaboration between the Tata Trusts and the Mittal Institute, Project Empower is working to bridge the mental health provider gap in India by building a digital platform to provide virtual training and supervision to community health workers as they identify and treat common mental health disorders.
India, the world’s third-largest energy consumer, generates 80% of its energy from coal, oil and biomass. To meet its future projected growth, the International Energy Agency in Paris says that India will need to add an electric power system the size of the EU’s every 20 years. It has made great strides, including ensuring each village is connected to the power grid, and its solar PV deployment program is one of the world’s ambitious. Yet it faces many challenges – energy poverty, access to clean water, increased road transportation, and high temperatures that yield a demand for air conditioning.
On March 26, the Building Bharat Boston Biosciences (B4) program held a two-session online webinar to mark the conclusion of its final phase. The Building Bharat-Boston Biosciences (B4) Program is the second iteration of the earlier Boston-Bangalore Biosciences Beginnings Program. Funded by the Department of Biotechnology within the Government of India, the B4 program is a collaboration between the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB) in Bangalore, the Harvard Global Research Support Centre India, and the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University.
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.