Editorial 1: How can ‘One Health’ help India, and India help ‘One Health’?
Introduction
- The concept of ‘One Health’ is currently gaining popularity worldwide; India has of late been taking significant strides to deploy concepts and strategies rooted in this idea to bolster the way it responds to health crises.
One Health concept
- One Health is a holistic approach to problems that recognises the interconnections between the health of humans, animals, plants, and their shared environment.
- An early articulation can be found in the writings of Hippocrates (460-367 BC), who contemplated the relationships between public health and clean environments.
- The 19th-century German physician and pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1863) later wrote: “Between animal and human medicines there are no dividing lines – nor should there be.”
Specialities
- Human population growth, urbanisation, and industrialisation have compounded the damage to biodiversity and ecosystems.
- These harmful environmental changes are linked to zoonoses – diseases shared between animals and humans.
- Researchers have estimated that 60% of emerging diseases that can infect humans are zoonotic in nature. They include bird flu, Ebola, rabies, and Japanese encephalitis.
- In addition, humankind has also become beset by major issues of antimicrobial resistance, food safety and security, and the control of vector-borne diseases.
- Taken together, these issues warrant both the intersectoral management and the efficiency that characterises the One Health strategy.
- One Health minimises resource requirements across sectors. An important way it does this is by encouraging coordination across governmental units, including the Ministries of Health and Family Welfare, Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Environment, and Science and Technology.
- Taking a One Health approach allows researchers to, for example, share their laboratories and findings, and ultimately make decisions that lead to resilient, sustainable, and predictable policies.
Recent One Health initiatives
- The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023 highlighted the importance of adopting a One Health approach.
- The Government of India established its ‘Standing Committee on Zoonoses’ in 2006 under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).
- The Department of Biotechnology launched India’s first consortium on One Health in October 2021.
- In June 2022, the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairy (DAHD) – in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Confederation of Indian Industry – launched a One Health pilot project in Karnataka and Uttarakhand.
- India is also currently preparing for a wider ‘National One Health Mission’ to be spearheaded by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor.
Ways to implement
- The implementation process can be broken down into four major stages. Each stage requires consistent political will and sustainable financing structures.
Stage 1: Communication
- In this stage, the basic mechanisms for communication between various ministries and/or sectors are set up. The focus is on keeping the important stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the One Health transformation.
Stage 2: Collaboration
- After initiating communication between the relevant sectors, sector members need to exchange their knowledge and expertise in order to translate ideas into short-term interventions.
Stage 3: Coordination
- The activities carried out during this stage are usually routine and long-term. Initiatives to achieve One Health in this stage are spearheaded by a national or a subnational agency.
Stage 4: Integration
- By default, government sectors and their units are designed to function vertically – and this is good for managing individual programmes. However, One Health is implicitly intersectoral, and existing system can’t accommodate One Health’s goals and mechanisms if it doesn’t ‘horizontalise’: i.e. it needs to integrate and develop synergies between programmes undertaken across various sectors.
Way forward
- To reap all the advantages of a One Health approach, India should move beyond short-term collaborations and create an integrated, science-based environment.
- This is a prerequisite for platforms to not just share office space but to also provide access to laboratories and biological samples to the relevant researchers.
Editorial 2: The U.K.-India relationship is alive with opportunity
Introduction
- It is fantastic to see India, the world’s largest democracy, take the global stage as host of the G-20, a vital forum for fostering international cooperation. The United Kingdom has long held the belief in trade as a force for growth and prosperity. It is why we advocate for free and fair trade at the World Trade Organization and why we are taking advantage of our newly recovered powers to forge trade deals with booming economies such as India.
India and UK
- As India’s middle class grows to a quarter of a billion middle class consumers by 2050, any improvements on our current trading relationship could be a huge boost for U.K. businesses.
- It is no secret that the U.K. and India share a thriving trading relationship, which was worth £36 billion in 2022.
- New figures from the U.K.’s Department for Business and Trade reveal that India retained its position as the U.K.’s second largest source of investment projects in the last financial year.
- And, importantly, our trade and investment relationship goes both ways. In fact, as India’s sixth largest investor, between April 2000 and March 2023, the U.K. has invested $34 billion in India in foreign direct investment.
- U.K. companies are also creating jobs and growth opportunities. There are 618 U.K. companies in India employing about 466,640 people directly as of 2021.
The ambitious FTA, a strong partnership
- Both parties are underway to discuss progress on an ambitious Free Trade Agreement, which could boost India’s bilateral trading relationship even further.
- The U.K. and India’s strong partnership extends far beyond trade and investment into culture, sport, education and tourism too.
- To borrow a phrase from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there is very much a ‘living bridge’ between our nations — you only have to look at our shared love of Bollywood to see this in action.
- As one of Bollywood’s largest audiences outside of India, the U.K. has featured in some of Bollywood’s iconic films.
- A vibrant Indian diaspora of over 1.6 million people makes a significant contribution across all walks of life in the U.K., from education through to the workforce, with Indian students making up one of the U.K.’s largest groups of international students.
Marketing campaign
- U.K. is launching ‘Alive with Opportunity’, a £1.5 million marketing campaign designed to showcase the tremendous bond between our countries and build on the continuous exchange of people, ideas and culture.
- As part of the U.K.’s ambitions to double trade with India by 2030, the campaign aims to stimulate interest and demand for U.K. goods and services, increase the U.K.’s ability to grow their business through trade with India, and attract new Indian inward investment.
Conclusion
- Over the course of the next year one can expect to see a celebration of the business, trade, cultural, and sporting links between the U.K. and India across billboards shining a light on this relationship which is very much alive with opportunity.
