The Science and Practice of Public Health

This book presents public health as a method-driven integrative discipline, a dynamic field of science and practice, shaped by the interplay of knowledge, power and ideology. Global in scope and written from the perspective of those engaged in public health policy and implementation, it draws its deepest lessons from diverse, resource-poor settings to generate grounded insights and innovative analytical frameworks for understanding common and complex challenges.

Section I of the book unpacks the definitions and theoretical approaches to public health, including the biomedical, social and behavioural questions of political economy as they relate to each other in the era of globalisation. Section II takes up disease control programmes, illustrating how knowledge of epidemiology, health systems and political context come together to shape the programmes and their outcomes. Section III then focuses on the cross-cutting puzzles and problematics of organising healthcare and strengthening health systems, including financing, governance, informatics and building learning-adaptive systems in the 21st century.

The book will be useful to students, researchers and teachers of Public Health, Public Policy, Sociology, Social Work and Development Studies. This will also be an invaluable companion to policymakers, general administrators, activists in civil society, media persons, and agencies like World Health Organization (WHO) and other global health institutions as the book will provide a critical understanding of a wide variety of contemporary debates and issues in health policy.

T. Sundararaman has been engaged in public health policy and health systems strengthening for over four decades. A post-graduate in internal medicine, the first two decades of his career were dedicated to the Faculty of Medicine in JIPMER, Pondicherry, before he shifted to working full-time on health policy. After serving as Director of the State Health Resource Centre, Chhattisgarh, for five years, he took over as Executive Director of the newly created National Health Systems Resource Centre, New Delhi where from 2007 to 2014, he played a major contributory role in the design and implementation of the National Health Mission. He then served for five years as Professor and Dean of School of Health Systems Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. In parallel to his professional work, he has also been a founder member and voluntary activist of People’s Health Movement, a coalition of civil society organisations which work for health equity and health rights. From 2019 to 2022, he served as Global Coordinator, People’s Health Movement. Currently, he is Adjunct Faculty in the JIPMER International School of Public Health, JIPMER, Puducherry.

Sitanshu Sekhar Kar is currently Professor in the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine at JIPMER and Officer-In-charge of JIPMER International School of Public Health, Puducherry, India. He was a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow during 2016– 2017 at the USC Institute for Global Health, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He leads the Health Technology Assessment-India Resource Hub and serves as the Convenor of the National Tobacco Regulators Forum under the National Tobacco Control Programme of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India. He has actively supported MoHFW in the strategic development and roll-out of the National Programme for prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) across multiple states. Dr Kar has been recognised for his contributions with fellowships from the Indian Association of Public Health (2019) and the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (2025). His key areas of expertise include chronic disease epidemiology, health technology assessment, tobacco control and medical education.

Daksha Parmar is presently working as Associate Professor, School of Public Health, D Y Patil Deemed to be University, Navi Mumbai. Earlier (2017–2023), Dr Parmar had worked as Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. She is a post-graduate in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and a doctorate in Public Health from Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is a recipient of fellowships from ICSSR; Rockefeller Archive Centre, Tarrytown; Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and the prestigious Dr Yusuf Hamied Faculty Fellowship at Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, in 2023. Her research spans public health, health policy, gender and social exclusion.