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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 cutting-edge, real-time digital tool that can assess climate-sensitive health risks at high spatial and temporal resolution, providing much-needed data and insights to guide public health interventions.
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”.
Current climate vulnerability assessment in India relies on time-consuming, error-prone manual methods of data collection; lacks real-time feedback loops which hinders their ability to evaluate intervention success; and is devoid of tools that integrate climate and health vulnerabilities. Existing climate vulnerability indices don’t have a common framework; are incomplete, focusing more on disaster management rather than the full scope of climate-sensitive health risks; have spatial resolution restricted to the district level, which 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.
Identifying these gaps, India Health Fund onboarded Khushi Baby to develop an integrated, real-time digital tool that calculates climate-sensitive health vulnerability and prioritizes interventions at the village, block, and district levels. The Machine Learning-led tool, called Climate Health Vulnerability Index (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 that has been in use by ASHA workers in Rajasthan for the last eight years. 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. 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.
“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 offers promise 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.”.
IHF’s 24-month phased grant 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.
India Health Fund is registered as Confluence for Health Action and Transformation Foundation (CHATF), a Section 8
charitable company incorporated in India, supported by the Tata Trusts.
