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This essay is part of the series: World Health Day 2026: Standing with Science in an Age of Shared Risk
World Health Day 2026 arrives at a moment when health debates are being shaped as much by science, trust, and institutions as by disease burdens themselves. This year’s theme, “Together for Health. Stand with Science”, shifts attention from discovery alone to the wider ecosystem that allows science to protect people, animals, plants, and the planet. Scientific collaboration, public confidence, and multilateral cooperation all sit at the heart of that effort. Health security in the twenty-first century will depend on more than laboratories, medicines, and expert knowledge. It will depend on whether countries can translate evidence into institutions that command trust, coordinate across sectors, and retain public legitimacy.
For India, the issue is strategic. The country has emerged from the COVID-19 years with greater scientific visibility, stronger confidence in digital public infrastructure, and a more ambitious health profile internationally. The next phase will test whether that capacity can be embedded in durable systems of governance. The One Health approach offers one of the clearest ways of thinking about that challenge. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes One Health as an integrated approach that seeks to optimise the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, while linking these concerns to infectious diseases, food safety, antimicrobial resistance, and ecological integrity.
A substantial share of known infectious diseases in humans is zoonotic, and most emerging infectious diseases originate in animals. In India, that epidemiological reality makes zoonotic risk central to any serious public health strategy. But One Health cannot stop at outbreak surveillance alone.
That definition deserves to be taken in full. A substantial share of known infectious diseases in humans is zoonotic, and most emerging infectious diseases originate in animals. In India, that epidemiological reality makes zoonotic risk central to any serious public health strategy. But One Health cannot stop at outbreak surveillance alone. The same stressors that drive spillovers also shape food safety risks, antimicrobial resistance, and environmental stress. Human settlements, livestock systems, wildlife habitats, antimicrobial use, and food chains are all part of the same ecological and economic landscape. One Health is valuable precisely because it treats these connections as part of a single policy problem. Outbreak control, then, cannot be confined to hospitals or emergency response. It therefore has to be about governing the wider conditions in which such risks emerge and spread.
India and One Health Architecture
India has spent the past few years moving from endorsement to institution-building on One Health. The National One Health Mission, approved through the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC), has been conceived as a cross-ministerial effort to coordinate, support, and integrate One Health activities across the country. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) serves as the implementing agency. An integrated framework developed jointly by multiple ministries and departments guides the Mission, which operates through a two-tier structure consisting of an Executive Committee chaired by the Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare and a Scientific Steering Committee chaired by the Principal Scientific Adviser. The National Institute of One Health in Nagpur is expected to serve as a key anchor in this effort.
The Mission’s design reflects an expansive reading of risk and preparedness. Its goals span integrated disease control, pandemic preparedness, early warning systems, surveillance, cross-sector data linkages, targeted research and development for vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics, and community participation. Together, these objectives suggest that One Health is being approached as a challenge of governance, information systems, scientific coordination, and preparedness, rather than being confined to field epidemiology alone. The move towards wider state engagement has also begun. In June 2025, the first State and Union Territory workshop under the National One Health Mission was held to support governance frameworks and operational planning.
Antimicrobial resistance cuts across clinical care, veterinary use, agriculture, wastewater contamination, infection prevention, diagnostics, and market behaviour. No single department can govern such a landscape effectively. If India can embed the One Health approach in antimicrobial resistance policy, it will offer a far more credible example of multisectoral governance than the many declarations that circulate in global health forums.
This architecture has also been strengthened through the National Centre for Disease Control. Its Centre for One Health works across several national programmes, including the National Rabies Control Programme, the National One Health Programme for Prevention and Control of Zoonoses, the Leptospirosis programme, and the National Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Snakebite Envenoming. The broader aim is to institutionalise One Health from the national level down to districts and below, through inter-sectoral coordination, integrated surveillance, sentinel sites, joint capacity-building, digital platforms, advocacy, and operational research. The push to eliminate dog-mediated rabies by 2030 offers one of the clearest examples of this approach being carried into a defined public programme. India would do well to treat One Health as a governance framework that speaks to health security, food systems, antimicrobial resistance, and environmental resilience.
Antimicrobial Resistance and Siloed Governance
India has taken a significant step through the National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance 2.0 for 2025-29. The plan emerged from consultation across human health, research, civil society, environment, and animal husbandry sectors, with the involvement of more than twenty ministries and departments. That breadth is central to the problem it seeks to address. Antimicrobial resistance cuts across clinical care, veterinary use, agriculture, wastewater contamination, infection prevention, diagnostics, and market behaviour. No single department can govern such a landscape effectively. If India can embed the One Health approach in antimicrobial resistance policy, it will offer a far more credible example of multisectoral governance than the many declarations that circulate in global health forums.
The international context strengthens the case. The Quadripartite institutions — the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and the World Health Organisation — launched the One Health Joint Plan of Action for 2022-2026 in response to the need for stronger national capacity to manage complex risks through more resilient systems. In May 2025, the World Health Assembly adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement, which called for deeper international collaboration and encouraged countries to develop multisectoral plans for pandemic prevention and preparedness, alongside stronger regulatory systems. India’s G20 presidency in 2023 had already drawn greater attention to One Health, antimicrobial resistance, climate-resilient systems, and equitable access to medical countermeasures.
These developments also open up a significant diplomatic opportunity for India. It can speak not only as a large country managing complex development challenges, but as one seeking to connect science with governance through institutions capable of working across sectors.
These developments also open up a significant diplomatic opportunity for India. It can speak not only as a large country managing complex development challenges, but as one seeking to connect science with governance through institutions capable of working across sectors. That experience will resonate across the Global South, where many countries confront similar pressures in the form of dense human-animal interfaces, uneven surveillance, fragile laboratory ecosystems, climate stress, and limited fiscal space. India brings real strengths in vaccines, generic medicines, digital platforms, field epidemiology, and programme delivery. The next phase, however, will demand more than supply: it will require standards, trust, and proof that domestic systems can function coherently across sectors.
Integration Will Define India’s One Health Ambition
India’s current challenge lies in making coordination work in practice. The broad architecture for One Health is improving, but everyday coordination across human health, veterinary services, wildlife, food systems, water, and environmental authorities remains uneven. Surveillance still operates largely within sectoral boundaries. Laboratory networks do not yet function as fully interoperable systems. Environmental intelligence, including wastewater signals and ecological risk indicators, has yet to enter routine public health practice at the scale required. State and district administrations also differ sharply in capacity, incentives, and readiness for cross-sector planning. Even the mission documents acknowledge that many of these capabilities are still being built.
Trust in science grows when institutions detect threats early, communicate clearly, act fairly, and coordinate with competence. A state guided by science must do more than fund research. It must connect data with decisions, laboratories with local administrations, and technical expertise with public accountability.
Leadership will rest on more than scientific capability; it will depend on trusted institutions, interoperable systems, and governance frameworks that enable different sectors to act in concert. These capacities shape outbreak response, but they also shape public confidence. Trust in science grows when institutions detect threats early, communicate clearly, act fairly, and coordinate with competence. A state guided by science must do more than fund research. It must connect data with decisions, laboratories with local administrations, and technical expertise with public accountability. Seen from that perspective, the One Health agenda sits squarely within the question of state capacity. It calls for pooled intelligence, shared protocols, joint investigations, common dashboards, cross-posted training, and financing arrangements that reward collaboration instead of bureaucratic isolation. The WHO’s World Health Day framing captures part of this challenge in calling for trust to be rebuilt and for science-led solutions to find a stronger place in public life.
One Health, Crisis Response, and Routine Governance
The Indian policy system should avoid treating One Health as something to be activated only in moments of crisis. Such an approach would leave the country permanently reactive. One Health needs to enter the routines of governance and administration. It should inform district preparedness, urban planning, laboratory strategy, veterinary-public health coordination, climate and environmental monitoring, and antimicrobial stewardship. It should also shape the training of public health managers, epidemiologists, clinicians, veterinarians, environmental scientists, and local administrators. A mission structure can set this process in motion, but lasting results will depend on sustained administrative redesign.
India has reached a decisive stage in its One Health journey. The question before it is not whether the framework has value, but whether it can be governed at scale. That is the test that will determine whether India remains a participant in the evolving language of global health or contributes to writing its institutional terms. Leadership in the Global South will rest on making One Health workable at home first. World Health Day 2026 should therefore be read in India as a policy challenge rather than a commemorative occasion. Standing with science involves more than defending evidence against misinformation or denialism. It requires systems that carry science across ministries, states, species, and borders. India has already laid several foundations. The next task is to turn them into durable capability. Success would strengthen protection for India’s population and offer a practical example of how science, sovereignty, development, and multilateral cooperation can be aligned in an age of shared risk.
Dr. K. Madan Gopal is a Senior Health Sector Expert and Public Health Systems Advisor with extensive experience in health policy, governance and systems strengthening. He formerly served as Senior Consultant at NITI Aayog.
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