1/n
The Chair, Professor Sanghmitra Acharya addresses the gathering. She welcomed all the previous and present batches and professors of the centre. She thanked Dr Banerji for establishing the centre with his unique vision of locating it within a School of Social Sciences

2/n
This began the saga of a #NewGrammarofPublicHealth.Dr Acharya also brought in the learnings regarding #Caste from Dr Ambedkar's work which has greatly influenced all of us and emphasized the need to look at public health with all of its social determinants.Even as we mark-

#AmbedkarJayanti tomorrow, today we honour all the stalwarts who have pioneered & advanced our understanding of public health. The Centre is bejeweled with Professors whose legacy speaks for itself-Dr Imrana Qadeer,Dr Ritu Priya, Dr Ghanshyam Shah,Dr Rama Baru, Dr Mohan Rao- 3/n

These are just some of the names our Centre boasts of having learnt from and grown with.
Our centre firmly believes #PublicHealthIsPolitics and we are indebted to our founders for establishing this centre that has given space to a #NewGrammarofPublicHealth 4/n

Some glimpses from the welcome address #CSMCHJNU #50yearsofCSMCH 5/n

Dr Sopory addresses the gathering:
He congratulated the Centre for the quality of teaching & knowledge generation it engaged in,even as we dealt with COVID.He urged members of the CSMCH community to connect further with themes such as environmental health, agriculture & so on.6/n

Prof.Arun Kumar lauded the founders for ensuring true inderdisciplinarity in the centre & situating public health in a politicosocial context."CSMCH... cannot be blamed of the malaise(of mathematizing everything forcibly)" 7/n

He urged the centre to continue guiding society and policymakers with its inderdisciplinary work
#newgrammarofpublichealth 8/n

Prof Imrana Qadeer shared her experiences of starting the centre with her background of Paediatrics and then moving towards interdisciplinarity with the centre. 9/n

10/n
Her advice to all engaging with public health: Public health is not an individual endeavour, it is necessary to shed one's individual ego and one's "disciplinary ego" to become truly inderdisciplinary as public health demands.

Prof. Patricia Uberoi addresses the gathering & highlights the problem with Indian academia that tends to cater to a Western gaze for its knowledge generation,in that regard she emphasised the need of courses like Comparative Studies in Health which look at India & China 11/n

She wished the Centre luck for the next 50 years so that it continues to contribute in a meaningful interdisciplinary way to Health Studies in India as well as the world.
12/n

Prof SK Thorat's address congratulated the imagination of the Centre in looking at Public health beyond disease and biomedicine and highlighted the progress JNU has made despite being a relatively young University! 13/n

Dr Srinath Reddy talks about shifts in public health with the increasing need to acknowledge the social determinants of health which CSMCH positions centrally to any analysis & understanding of health despite the increasing technocentric approaches & heavy reliance on RCTs 14/n

15/n Despite not being a student of the Centre, he considers himself a beneficiary of the Centre due to his learning from the Centre and especially Dr Qadeer. He spoke about how the social determinants of health are being realised through fields like epigenetics whereby there's-

a realisation of the influence of social determinants on even genes.
He spoke of the need to move beyond "simplistic solutions for complex problems" and emphasized the need to centre the community in public health rather than governments and agencies.
16/n

Interdisciplinary integration is pivotal for this to happen. Dr Reddy hopes that CSMCH shall continue to collaborate across disciplines and sectors to contribute and lead in the field of public health in the coming years. 17/n

Dr Sheila Zurbrigg talks about her own journey & how the Centre featured in it. She speaks of her scepticism regarding the Western tendency to attribute falling mortality in the developing world to modern medicine. 18/n

Rakku's story, an oft discussed reading at CSMCH,inspired her to look beyond clinical medicine. She spoke about Malaria & the role of starvation in the same. She thanked CSMCH for unrelenting academic & advocacy work. She looks forward to the centre's "courageous future"💖✊🏽 19/n

Prof R.K. Mutatkar reminisced about his interaction with stalwarts of #CSMCH & how it influenced the setting up of an interdisciplinary centre at Savitribai Phule University. 20/n

He cited the work of Dr Banerji which sums up the framework of the centre which looks at health from a people centric lens and urged the centre to continue looking to its founder for inspiration. 21/n

Prof Navarro next addressed the gathering where he acknowledged that "the international order is in profound crisis" and is not serving the population.This was predicted by Dr Banerji where he called the order a part of the problem. Prof Navarro sees this further accentuated 22/n

In recent times. He hopes to continue associating with Dr Banerji and the Centre so as to contribute to raising awareness and generating knowledge. He thanked Dr Banerji for exposing the cruelty in the world for which his name shall be remembered.
23/n

Dr Abhay Bang of Medico Friends Circle spoke about the difference in approach yet continued engagement for public health that the Centre had with him and MFC. He thanked the Centre for its guidance and work in the MFC over the years.

We have returned from tea to hear from the founders regarding the journey of the centre! Dr Banerji spoke of how #CSMCH set out to expand the borders and language of public health
#NewGrammarofPublicHealth
Dr Qadeer spoke of the excitement when the centre began - 24/n

It was new for her and new in itself, an experiment full of possibilities!
Dr Banerji shared this excitement for creating a new body of knowledge for the people of India.
#50yearsofCSMCH #CSMCHJNU #NewGrammarofPublicHealth
25/n

Prof. Qadeer speaks of the evolution of the courses in the Centre and how CSMCH moved from drawing from different social sciences to finally learning to integrate social sciences into public health. 26/n
#NewGrammarofPublicHealth #50yearsofCSMCH #CSMCHJNU

Prof Banerji talked about the challenges in bringing in the #NewGrammarofPublicHealth especially in terms of making sure that technology remains subordinate to the needs of our people. 27/n
#50yearsofCSMCH #CSMCHJNU

28/n Prof Qadeer spoke about role of CSMCH in guiding other universities in creating courses in Public Health.She speaks of how CSMCH was not only around at the time of the Alma Ata Declaration but was a part of it. Such has been the engagement of the Centre & it continues✊🏽💖

29/n Prof Ghanshyam Shah reminisced about his time at the Centre and spoke about the immense contribution of #CSMCHJNU to bring in the multiple dimensions of Health including economic, cultural, local and global phenomenon into the purview of Public Health.

30/n Dr Mohan Rao recounts his experiences as doctor which influenced him, "we were constantly treating children with diarrhoea and restoring them to an environment that bred diarrhoea"
#NewGrammarofPublicHealth #50yearsofCSMCH #CSMCHJNU

31/n "CSMCH opened a world I had longed for both intellectually and socially " He expressed his love for the seminars, journal clubs, the learning from people across centres, canteen conversations that led to big changes, the courses he taught and the students he taught💖✊🏽

32/n He concluded with gratitude to the centre "We did not allow conscience to be killed by arithmetic as we so often do"
✊🏽💖

#CSMCHJNU #NewGrammarofPublicHealth
#50YearsOfCSMCH

33/n We hear from friends & alumni of the Centre including Dr CAK Yesudian,Dr Betsy Hartmann,Prof Darshan Shankar among others. They express their fondness for their colleagues from the Centre and gratitude to the Centre for the academic engagement & warmth CSMCH has offered.

34/n They lauded the Centre for its pioneering work. Dr Shankar observed how the very name of the Centre displays its promise to move beyond the biomedical framework and move towards community knowledge.

35/n Dr Anant Phadke spoke about the many things he learnt from the Centre and her professors especially due to his non-academic background. He hopes the centre shall continue to guide people in the field of public health.
#CSMCHJNU #NewGrammarofPublicHealth
#50YearsOfCSMCH

36/n Some friends of the Centre addressing the gathering online fondly recollecting the collaborations with the Centre. They congratulated the centre for its rich legacy and its contribution to their own public health journeys.

37/n Professor Niels Brimnes spoke about the pre-history + inception of the Centre and wished the Centre luck for its future. Mr Amulya Nidhi lauded the Centre for its contribution to people's health & on ground engagement & guidance to health activists.
#50YearsOfCSMCH

38/n We're back with a panel discussion on Challenges and opportunities for the discipline of Public Health in contemporary times, moderated by DrRitu Priya.
#CSMCHJNU #NewGrammarofPublicHealth

39/n
The Panel includes Dr Mathew George, Dr Arima Mishra, Dr Rakhal Gaitonde, Dr P. Unnikrishnan Dr Nakeeran, Dr Soumitra Roy, Dr C.K. George, Dr Ramila Bisht and Dr Rajib Dasgupta.

40/n Dr Mathew George: Inderdisciplinarity is necessary in public health yet there is a caveat that it maybe subsumed by dominant disciplines.

The question arises how are the questions addressed in public health different from the questions of other disciplines?

41/n Do we need to wait for larger change in socio-political context or can we get at the low-hanging fruit? Looking only at the macro level may not reach the people. How do we move from purely academic engagement and take public health to the people?

42/n Dr Arima Mishra: We have not "liberated" ourselves from medicine. We still need epidemiology in practice of public health.Question remains, what is the field of public health about? Is there a technical part to it? Are we missing out on the technical due to focus on social?

43/n More relevant question is what is the state of public health? And what should our response look like? This can lead to educational responses to the challenges.
...
Important to learn from different trajectories in public health as has been done at our university (APU).

44/n Dr Neerja Sood: Medical faculty did not agree to a multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary public programme. Ministry approached IGNOU for Community Health Officer(CHO) programme after exhausting all other options.Currently located in medical/nursing colleges/District hospitals.

45/n Some states collaborated with public health institutes etc with different durations and content. This brought up a challenge in standards of the course. Monitoring also became a challenge.

46/nPersonal experience of Dr Neerja Sood,after PhD in Public Health, nursing community felt she was now a public health person not nurse, while Public Health dominated by Doctors could not include her since she "was not in medicine". The medical hegemony continues-Dr Ritu Priya.

47/n Dr Rakhal Gaitonde quoted Dr Banerji regarding the need for systems to adapt to people and not the other way round. ...
It is important not only to look at the design of programmes but also the knowledge on which the design is based.

48/n "There is a difference between the cause of disease and the cause of distribution of disease" Dr Gaitonde emphasised the latter and asked how do we impact the structural determinants of health? How do we reflect on the ability to engage and change these larger structures?

49/n How do we create institutional spaces that are democratic? As a teacher how are we creating space for students who themselves are suffering to various kinds of trauma? How can we not only change society but also within the teaching of public health?

50/n "How can I bring the street into the classroom and how do I take the classroom to the street?
... How do we learn from local and individual philosophers?
... How do we learn from the silicosis andolan? How do all of these inform our teaching?"

Dr P Unnikrishnan: How epistemologically pluralistic are our systems when trying to me the health needs of the people?
Example: some AYUSH students are unable to integrate their own disciplines into the practice of public health. 51/n

There are barely any efforts and data for integration of pluralistic health system. This is lacking which leads to marginalisation of AYUSH systems. 52/n

Dr Nakeeran: There is a tension between public health education and public health practice.
...
How do we bridge antagonistic values of commercial public health education and public health practice? 53/n

Surprisingly, water and sanitation forms a small or no part of most public health courses. It highlights another tension between healthcare, health systems and other health practice. 54/n

The debate of social science and public health continues. Most often theories get truncated and applied in public health. 55/n

Prof Nakeeran continues: ...serious erosion of the word "public" not just as a technical term but also as an emotion. The public space has become commercialised, privatised, individualised and virtualised. For instance: even movie watching is no longer a public experience. 56/n

It is important to unpack the meanings of the word in context of public health as well. 57/n

Dr Prashanth @prashanthns' note shared by Dr Ritu Priya:Opportunities for public health professionals to immerse themselves within communities are diminishing. When will the 600 odd districts of India get to meet the professionals that engage in public health within schools?58/n

59/n important to examine the new public health schools which rarely make explicit their visions of public health.

60/n Dr Anurag Bhargava: Quoting Dr Rudolf Virchow- Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine at a large scale.
...
Apart from technical knowledge it is important to have social sensitivities and not be bogged down by processes alone.

61/n "Why are so many people getting TB each year and why are so many dying of it when we have a cure?" Important to involve social science with medical science. Undernutrition visibilised after some work by JSS and team.

62/n Medical systems are not responsive to these vulnerabilities. All are given the same treatment.

63/n Dr Bhargava suggested including Non communicable diseases in the curriculum.

"Medical or health sciences are a team sport"

"Exposure to hospitals is not optional but essential for public health"

64/n Dr Soumitra Roy: taking the example of Ebola that affected Liberia and other African countries. In 2014, bigger outbreak caused by traveller. Case fatality rate 60%. Not much was known about the disease. Many frontline workers die, including 182 nurses died.

65/n Nearly all health facilities shut down. Several conspiracy theories were floated- including it was started by the US or that the govt was inducing this to control population. There was even believed that people were being killed in the Ebola treatment units.

66/n Big initiative taken: Patients being admitted to the ETU were given phones to family as well as patients which built confidence in the ETU which then helped to improve treatment uptake.

67/n As new outbreaks of diseases come up, social sciences are getting lot of attention. There is a big scope of public health practice in the coming days. Need for social scientists to be prepared for the upcoming challenges.

68/n Dr Indranil Mukhopadhyay: ...even political economy of health is dominated by neoliberal ideas.

Binaries of quantitative and qualitative methods have been created which are artificial. Both need to be learnt. These cannot be escaped.

69/n "The state has eyes everywhere but it does not have ears."

70/n As students, we thought speaking truth to power should be orgasmic to us. No one teaches us to speak truth to power. We need to open academic spaces to activists and others.

71/n Dr CK George: there is now a confusion regarding the term "global health". Several definitions of it.

72/n UHC an improvement form disease-centric MDGs. Now several transnational issues being looked at but not taken up by Global Health professionals. Seen as more "political"

73/n Many rural health initiatives taken up by Global health professionals are well intentioned but many govts themselves may not be creating national agenda adequately and not engaging with civil society.

74/n Several global health initiatives reflect the systems they're situated in, hence tend to be very technocentric and tend to focus on risk-benefit without necessarily looking at the context.

Not much has changed in the last 20-25 years despite change in who holds power

75/n Dr Ramila Bisht: There is a need to change the position of social sciences as a conceptual resource without deeper engagement.
Health social scientists are overall marginalised within public health circles.

76/n Even Public health associations do not give space to health social scientists, even if they do, they're not given positions of power. This prevents them from influencing public health policy and academics.

77/n Dr Rajib Dasgupta: Real life epidemiology is very messy.

All the programmes in their final analysis make you realise that they are built brick by brick and the practice necessitates the inclusion and understanding of social science as a brick in the process.

The failure of public health is in the failure to inculcate the social science understanding so that people are rendered helpless when the need to use social sciences arises. 78/n

79/n Dr M. Prakasamma discusses the tensions in public health where even "social medicine and community health" as a name reinforces this dichotomy. She also brings in the need to bring in other fields of arts and logic and ethics because people are affected by all of these

80/n In the last 3 decades we have seen a civilisational shift in birthing practices. It is very difficult to find a "dai". This is an example of the changes in public health that are not being included in its designs.

81/n how do we respond to persistent level of anaemia? How do we show that it is not just a programmatic but a conceptual and ideological failure?

82/n if we take the problem approach then the problem takes precedence over the discipline. Going beyond, health and people need to take precedence.

83/n Dr Anand Krishnan: Are we preparing our post graduates or MPH to address the socio-political challenges in health? Are we teaching them activism?

Another issue is the lack of engagement of public health professionals with Antimicrobial resistance.

84/n We need to learn to borrow from other disciplines. There is a tendency to throw everything until something sticks. This needs to change. -Dr Anand Krishnan

85/n Dr V. Sujatha spoke about work on social epidemiology by Dr Qadeer and of Dr Banerji on tuberculosis that shifts the onus of treatment from the individual to the system...The philosophy of medicine says within the biomedical theory there is no sense of positive health.

86/n this can be worked upon and developed further.
Big chasms exist between academic insights of public health and policy and practice. These need to be bridged.

87/n Need to look at how pluralistic systems of medicine are accepted in times of contingency, for instance during COVID.
...
Public health tends to act as a buffer between the reductionism of medical sciences and the sociologism of social sciences, Dr Sujatha concluded.

88/n Dr P. Kulkarni: last few years saw common use of terminology like herd immunity in the public domain, then came the forecasts for the peak of cases of COVID most of which were done by demographers,economists,statisticians...These were popular but the footnotes we're ignored

89/n These are the problems that arise when specialists are not integrated.

90/n Dr T. Sundararaman:
There are some tensions that public health seems to be grappling with as talked about over the discussion.

There is a false dichotomy of activism and academics. They overlap.

91/n There is a need to challenge the prevailing doctrine in public health, as Indranil earlier pointed out with health economics. Similarly health is looked at from an incentivised management perspective and not a public goods perspective.

92/n Thus the challenge is not just interdisciplinarity but also within the discipline itself.

There is a need to get in the policy space since the policy discourse tends to legitimise the worst of anti-people policies.

93/93Dr Ritu Priya concluding:
Tensions are bound to remain given the large subject matter.Continuous dialogue & introspection necessary due to this inevitable tension. Thus there's a need to create forum for ongoing discussion on this to ensure constant creation and co-creation.