PROJECT SANCHAR – Evidence Based Public Policy and Practice

Project SANCHAR (Science and News: Communicating Health And Research) is an initiative led by Dr. K. Vish Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Faculty Director of the Harvard Chan India Research Center (IRC). Initiated in 2018 and funder by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal of this project is to make the Harvard Chan School India Research Center a one-stop place to disseminate the latest evidence base on major public health problems in India. This initiative has a two-fold aim: (a) to build a knowledge repository that will create a dashboard for stakeholders to obtain the latest evidence on public health subjects; (b) to build capacity among major stakeholders from the public, nonprofits, and the media to use evidence-base in their practice to shape public knowledge, attitudes, and policy on health.

Knowledge Portal: The project’s website (www.projectsanchar.org) offers resources such as knowledge and policy briefs on health indicators, webinars on public health themes, and a data portal on reproductive, maternal, newborn, child health, and nutrition from the National Family Health Survey-4. The site also connects journalists with technical experts for insights and quotes.

Training for Media Houses: Training workshops for health journalists on ‘How to avoid misinformation: A workshop on evidence-based health reporting’, or, ‘भ्रामक सूचना से कैसे बचें : साक्ष्य आधारित स्वास्थ्य पत्रकारिता’ were conducted. The workshops were led by Dr. K. Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication, and used interactive exercises and examples for teaching how to interpret evidence and translate them into stories. Trainings were conducted with Hindi media houses such as – Amar Ujala, Dainik Jagran, Hindustan, where journalists reporting on health across UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Chandigarh attended the training. A total of 200 journalists from 9 states and 70 districts in India were trained through these workshops.

Read more about the workshops here

Building Public Agenda and Policy Support for Public Health: A series of workshops for key decision-makers at the forefront of policy and implementation of public health initiatives. Workshops were conducted in Patna (Bihar), Mussoorie (Uttarakhand) and Gaya (Bihar) in collaboration with the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) and Bihar Institute of Public Administration & Rural Development (BIPARD), focusing on focused on strategic communication, social determinants of health, communication inequalities, message preferences and framing, and leveraging social media, with examples from national and state campaigns and NFHS-5 data. Four 2-day workshops were conducted and were attended by about 200 Indian administrative service officers from the central and state cadres. These included officers from the field who are at the frontline of public communications, from the departments of Health, Prohibition and Information and Public Relations as well as senior officers with 15-17 years of experience. Read more about the workshops here.