Scientific ambition will matter only if India’s public institutions can train a workforce able to govern interconnected risks with competence and credibility
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This essay is part of the series: World Health Day 2026: Standing with Science in an Age of Shared Risk
As World Health Day 2026 approaches, the One Health conversation is entering a more operational phase. On 7 April, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the French G7 Presidency will convene the One Health Summit in Lyon, France. From 7 to 9 April, the inaugural Global Forum of WHO Collaborating Centres will bring together nearly 800 scientific institutions from more than 80 countries. WHO’s theme this year, “Together for Health. Stand with Science”, thus arrives in a setting shaped less by abstract endorsement than by a practical question: which countries can build the institutions, workforce, and habits of coordination needed to turn science into routine public action?
That question is highly relevant for India. One Health has entered policy language with unusual speed, but the risks it seeks to manage still arrive through fragmented systems. They surface through livestock practices, wildlife contact, food chains, wastewater, urban expansion, ecological stress, and antimicrobial use, then pass through separate ministries, surveillance channels, and administrative routines. A public system confronted by such risks must do more than collect evidence. It has to read signals across sectors, coordinate early, and respond in ways that remain credible to the public.
India has already begun to assemble the architecture for that shift. The next step is less about announcing additional frameworks and more about teaching the system to use the ones it already has. Missions and committees can create direction, but they do not automatically produce district-level competence, cross-sector working habits, or institutional trust. Those capabilities have to be built through training, repeated practice, and organisational design. For India, the immediate One Health challenge is therefore educational as much as regulatory. It concerns whether programme managers, epidemiologists, veterinarians, microbiologists, environmental professionals, and district administrators can be trained to interpret interconnected risks through a shared operational lens.
India needs a workforce that can operate across domains, interpret incomplete evidence, communicate under uncertainty, and coordinate across administrative lines. That calls for a training model built around interdisciplinary teaching, scenario-based exercises, simulation, continuing education, and stronger integration between epidemiology, management, communication, and field administration.
Read this way, World Health Day 2026 sharpens a policy question that is at the centre of the country’s next phase of health systems reform. Scientific capacity is growing, institutional architecture is taking shape, and international attention to One Health is rising. The more difficult task now lies in preparing the public system to act on that knowledge consistently and at scale. That is why teaching and training belong much closer to the centre of the One Health agenda.
One Health can enter public administration only when it changes how officials are trained to see a problem. A district officer reading a disease signal, a veterinarian tracking livestock risk, a microbiologist interpreting laboratory data, or a hospital administrator planning for outbreak response may all be looking at the same event from different corners of the system. The work ahead lies in teaching them to read those signals together. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), zoonotic spillover, environmental contamination, and preparedness failures rarely arrive as separate issues in the real world. They accumulate across sectors and then test whether institutions can think in connected ways. That kind of competence has to be built deliberately.
This is why training institutions deserve more attention in the One Health conversation than they usually receive. Their importance comes from a practical function. They turn policy language into administrative habits. The National Institute of Health and Family Welfare (NIHFW) has a useful role here. Its mandate covers education, training, research, and policy support in health and family welfare, which gives it a strong vantage point at a time when public systems are being asked to work across older programme boundaries. For a framework such as One Health, that role becomes especially valuable because the challenge is not only technical knowledge. It is whether the system can learn to handle complexity in a structured way.
The SAKSHAM platform was developed as a digital learning initiative by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) through NIHFW, with a central repository of courses, training material, and a database of trained health professionals.
A more useful question, then, concerns the form that capacity-building should take. India needs a workforce that can operate across domains, interpret incomplete evidence, communicate under uncertainty, and coordinate across administrative lines. That calls for a training model built around interdisciplinary teaching, scenario-based exercises, simulation, continuing education, and stronger integration between epidemiology, management, communication, and field administration. The first State and Union Territory engagement workshop under the National One Health Mission moved in this direction by discussing a unified e-learning module for State and UT officials alongside wider governance reforms. That is the sort of detail that matters, because it points to One Health as a teachable administrative capability rather than a conference slogan.
There is already an institutional base on which to build. NIHFW’s ecosystem includes formal programmes in public health and health administration, in-service training, institutional training, and digital learning infrastructure. Its training calendar includes programmes on managing public health emergencies for district health officers. The SAKSHAM platform was developed as a digital learning initiative by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) through NIHFW, with a central repository of courses, training material, and a database of trained health professionals. Tools of this kind matter because One Health will have to reach managers, faculty, trainers, and district-level decision-makers at scale if it is to shape routine governance.
Seen from that angle, institutions such as NIHFW do more than support the system from the margins. They can help determine whether One Health remains confined to specialist circles or enters mainstream public administration. They can build shared learning spaces across sectors, widen executive and in-service training, and strengthen habits of evidence use and public reasoning. India’s next gains in One Health may depend less on inventing new frameworks and more on whether institutions like these are used to train a workforce capable of operating one effectively.
Public trust in health systems is often discussed as though it were a problem of messaging alone. In practice, trust is built much earlier and in much quieter ways. It is built when institutions respond on time, when frontline officials know what to say and what not to say, when guidance does not change without explanation, and when different parts of the state do not contradict one another in public. Citizens rarely encounter “the health system” in the abstract. They encounter a district officer, a hospital administrator, a surveillance worker, a helpline, a training manual, or a local health facility. Their confidence in science is shaped by whether those points of contact appear competent, fair, and prepared.
Public institutions do not become credible by issuing technical guidance alone. They become credible when their personnel are trained to exercise judgement under pressure, communicate uncertainty without causing confusion, and apply rules with consistency.
That is why training must be treated as part of institutional trust-building. Public institutions do not become credible by issuing technical guidance alone. They become credible when their personnel are trained to exercise judgement under pressure, communicate uncertainty without causing confusion, and apply rules with consistency. In health administration, this means that ethics, communication, leadership, documentation, and interdepartmental coordination should be treated as core competencies rather than peripheral ones. A system that trains well is usually easier to trust because it appears steadier, clearer, and less improvisational in moments of stress.
For India, this carries an important lesson. The future of public health will depend not only on stronger surveillance, better laboratories, or more ambitious missions, but also on whether public institutions can produce a workforce that inspires confidence. Training institutions have a distinctive role here because they shape the culture of administration before crises test it. They can normalise habits of evidence use, procedural clarity, respectful communication, and collaborative problem-solving across sectors. That contribution may appear modest when compared with large policy announcements, but it often determines whether those policies are experienced by the public as credible action or as another layer of official language.
Dr. Sunil Vilasrao Gitte is a Director at the National Institute of Public Health Training and Research (NIPHTR) and a Deputy Director General at the Central Leprosy Division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.
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Dr. Sunil Vilasrao Gitte is Director at the National Institute of Public Health Training and Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. ...
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