Using a Citizens’ Commission to Drive Health Policy Change in India

Welcome to the Harvard Center for International Development’s Beyond COVID podcast. This podcast is a series of conversations with CID faculty experts on various key dimensions of COVID response and recovery. Our goal with these conversations, and with CID’s Beyond COVID research initiative, is to make use of lessons learned and capitalize on emergent innovations sparked by the pandemic in order to address losses and reimagine global development in the post-COVID era. On February 18, 2022, we were joined by Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, Director of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard, and Co-Chair of The Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. CID Student Ambassador Devangana Rana sat down with Tarun to discuss his work with the Lancet Citizens’ Commission and more generally his insights on building resilient and equitable health systems.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.