Vet World   Vol.17   December-2024  Article - 22 

One Health initiative in India: Genesis and hurdles in establishing the first consortium

There are several challenges in implementing a meaningful One Health program. These include (a) understanding the language, intricacies, idiosyncrasies, and outcome indicators for each sector in multi-sectoral collaborations, (b) requirement of each partner to be trained outside their area of expertise, (c) absence of analysis of economics and long-term benefits, (d) complexities of the coordination and hand-holding of the various partners, and (e) uninterrupted financing of large consortia. There is, however, a clear understanding of the need for a team effort to support sustainable and progressive development. To achieve such an effort in India, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science and Technology, through prolonged deliberation, initiated a One Health project to understand the pervasiveness of the ten most critical zoonotic diseases through a nationwide study of the prevalence of these diseases in animals and to estimate the burden of the same diseases in clinical syndromes encountered in hospital settings. At the end of the project, we hope to map the spread and potential hotspots of the various diseases studied to undertake further collaborative studies focusing on diseases specific to particular geographic locations in the future. This review outlines the One Health initiatives in India and describes the difficulties in implementing the DBT One Health Consortium project. 

Keywords: One Health, transboundary animal diseases, zoonoses.

How to cite this article: Hegde NR, Talari M, and Majumdar SS (2024) One Health initiative in India: Genesis and hurdles in establishing the first consortium, Veterinary World, 17(12): 2925–2931.

Received: 2024-08-03    Accepted: 2024-11-28    Published online: 2024-12-26

Corresponding author: Nagendra R. Hegde    E-mail: hegde@niab.org.in

DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2024.2925-2931

Copyright: Hegde, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.