Mumbai, India: India Health Fund (IHF), a Tata Trusts initiative, is expanding its pioneering work at the intersection of climate and health, and digital innovation by partnering with Khushi Baby (KB) to develop a Climate Health Vulnerability Index (CHVI): an AI-based real-time decision support tool to help assess climate-related health risks and enable proactive public health interventions to reduce community health risks.
India is one of the most climate-vulnerable nations globally, with 17 out of 20 Indians falling under the “vulnerable” category and 5 out of 20 being “highly vulnerable” to climate change. By 2030, between 160 to 200 million people are expected to be at risk from deadly heat exposure, 1.3 billion people will continue to be exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution, and over 500 million are living in pandemic jump zones where zoonotic diseases can easily jump from animals to humans.
“To address the (Climate and Health) risk, we need to first accurately assess the risk, especially at the local level ”, said Mr. Madhav Joshi, CEO, India Health Fund. “And this is where fragmented systems and poor processes of data collection fall short ”.
Photo source: Khushi Baby
With millions exposed to the rising effects of climate change, India and many other countries require localized, data-driven insights to guide effective public health interventions. Current methods to assess climate vulnerability rely on time-consuming, error-prone manual data collection methods; which are not available in real-time; and often don’t cover village-level information. This prevents them from making accurate, localized predictions at the village level (crucial for geographically diverse states); and have limited temporal resolution, with most calculations utilizing data from 2019 or earlier instead of real-time data that accounts for evolving climate and health conditions.
India Health Fund is supporting Khushi Baby, a non-profit organization, to develop an integrated, AI-based real-time decision support tool to help assess climate-related health risks and enable proactive public health interventions to reduce community health risks. This tool, called Climate Health Vulnerability Index (CHVI) will integrate climate and health vulnerabilities into one tool and will deliver granular insights with a high level of accuracy at village, block, and district levels. CHVI generates a composite vulnerability score based on several factors: exposure to climate stressors like temperature, air quality, and rainfall; population sensitivity factors such as age and health status; and adaptive capacity, including access to healthcare and socio-economic conditions.
CHVI builds on Khushi Baby’s flagship platform CHIP, which has transformed healthcare delivery for over 45 million people across Rajasthan. CHIP began in 2014 with maternal and child health initiatives, replacing paper records with NFC-enabled tools.
By 2017, CHIP 1.0 was officially launched, driving improvements in immunization rates and reducing malnutrition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CHIP supported vaccination tracking and digital health census efforts in Rajasthan. Today, the platform has onboarded over 75,000 Community Health Workers (CHWs), reaching 45 million beneficiaries across 40,000 villages, scaled fully within Rajasthan’s public health system. CHIP 2.0 is now being developed as an open-source Digital Public Good (DPG), with advanced features like multi-state portal compatibility and enhanced data security. The organization’s B2G model focuses on co-developing solutions with governments and transitioning implementation responsibilities to them, ensuring sustainability. Khushi Baby has already secured partnerships in states like Karnataka and Maharashtra to scale CHIP 2.0 further, aiming for national adoption and creating a scalable, impactful, and sustainable public health solution.
Building on successes and lessons from CHIP, CHVI will go a step further and assess climate-sensitive health vulnerability indices, which will help forecast risks such as air pollution spikes, heat-related illnesses, or vector-borne disease outbreaks and enable proactive responses. CHVI holds the potential to function as an early warning system for health officials to deploy targeted interventions and reallocate resources swiftly and appropriately to areas where climate-sensitive health risks are the highest.
Photo source: Khushi Baby
“IHF is excited to fast-track the development of CHVI, an innovation that tackles both sides of the climate-and-health coin – adaptation and mitigation,” remarked Mr. Joshi.
With the ability to integrate data with state-level health monitoring systems, CHVI promises to enhance state-level early warning capacity and risk management.
“As one of the first climate-health adaptation strategies from the Global South, CHVI promises infinite insights,” said Dr. Ruchit Nagar, CEO, Khushi Baby. “While in the short term, CHVI will churn out vulnerability indices in real-time at the local level, in the long term, the insights will pave a data-driven path for policies and programmes across states and at the national level.”
The initiative builds on IHF’s pioneering work in enabling the application of science and technology-based tools to address public health challenges and the commitment to support action towards the adaptation of health systems to the impact of climate change on human health. IHF’s support to Khushi Baby will catalyze the development of CHVI in Rajasthan involving data engineering, policy inputs and stress testing, followed by a validation phase with pilot testing, training, and feedback loops. A final refinement phase will allow for model adjustments, training, state-wide dissemination in Rajasthan and positioning the open-access digital public good for multi-state adoption.