The Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health announced the opening of a centre in Mumbai on the first floor of the Piramal Tower Annexe to help broaden and coordinate the School’s nearly 60 years of collaborations to improve health in India and around the world.
The Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health’s new centre is the first in South Asia and the space has been provided through a generous charitable contribution by Dr. Swati Piramal and Ajay Piramal, two Harvard alumni.
The new facilities will be opened on December 20. Harvard Business School has had a centre in Mumbai since 2006. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has had active research and educational programmes in India since the 1960s, but not an established physical office or centre until now.
Harvard Chan School’s acting dean David Hunter said he sees many opportunities for the two schools to expand interactions between each other and with a wide variety of businesses and public health organisations and state and central governments within India dedicated to improving health in the country and the South Asia region.
“India has made dramatic progress in recent years,” said dean Hunter. “For more than a decade, it has experienced record-breaking economic growth that has been accompanied by significant reductions in poverty. Infant mortality fell from 64 to 41 per 1,000 live births from 2000 to 2013. Life expectancy at birth has increased from 62 to 66 years, and the maternal mortality ratio has fallen from 390 to 189 per 100,000 live births over the same period.”
Speaking about the need for collaborative health programmes, Dr. Swati Piramal said, “Healthcare has always been a primary area of focus for us. Through our philanthropic arm, Piramal Foundation, we are working towards supporting primary rural healthcare and working along with the state governments on serious healthcare issues such as maternal and child mortality.” Dr. Piramal further added, “We truly believe that the solutions to India’s health problems lie in innovation and structured research in clinical and public health. We hope that the presence of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health will contribute positively towards this process.”
“India’s rapidly growing health system is placing huge demands on the country’s capacity to educate the next generation of researchers, clinical and public health professionals, and health system policymakers and managers,” said Dean Hunter. “We believe the new Mumbai centre will enable us to establish new collaborations and expand existing partnerships to increase the number of trained public health professionals and researchers in India, and to help strengthen the leadership of public health officials in central and state governments as well as private health-sector organisations.”
“We are very excited by the opportunities the new Mumbai office will help facilitate,” said Dr. Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, director of the new Mumbai centre and who himself was born in Andhra Pradesh. “As the world’s second most populous country—and projected to become its most populous by 2030—India has a unique opportunity through public health interventions ranging from smoking cessation initiatives to maternal and infant health programmes to improve the well-being of all its citizens, as well as to improve global health more broadly. We are all proud to be part of what we anticipate will be an exciting time in public health in one of the largest democracies in the world.”
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is part of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts USA. It brings together dedicated experts from many disciplines to educate new generations of global health leaders and produce powerful ideas that improve the lives and health of people everywhere.
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