Enabling Public Health Foundation of India's Network of Indian Institutes of Public Health.

India is building a network of eight public health institutes to train a new generation of health professionals and researchers. India faces a severe shortage of trained public health professionals. The country has one of the world's highest disease burdens, yet its public health workforce is thin, fragmented, and lacks formal multidisciplinary training. Existing institutions cannot produce enough graduates to staff state health departments, run disease surveillance systems, or advise on health policy. This grant addresses that gap by creating the Indian Institutes of Public Health (IIPHs), a coordinated network modelled on the Indian Institutes of Technology. Over five years, the first three IIPHs will open, each starting with 20 faculty members and growing to about 70. These institutes will run Masters courses, conduct collaborative research, and build formal links with state governments, health services, and NGOs. If successful, the network will produce a steady stream of qualified public health practitioners who can strengthen India's health systems, improve disease surveillance, and inform evidence-based policy. The project is primarily about building institutional capacity and human capital rather than answering a specific scientific question, but without this infrastructure, fundamental and applied public health research in India cannot scale.