The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has tied with the prestigious Cochrane Library to make available freely the upto-date health research evidence on healthcare interventions to about 60 million internet users in India.

The ICMR recently signed a three-year contract for national subscription with the publishers, John Wiley and Sons, to extend a sponsorship for making available the database to the Indian users.

The internationally renowned Cochrane Library is a collection of regularly updated evidence based healthcare databases, including gold-standard Cochrane Systematic Reviews, that can help clinicians and consumers make decisions about what treatments are best for them and their patients. This information is produced and assembled by the Cochrane Collaboration (www.cochrane.org), a UK registered international charity, which is considered to be one among the leaders in the field.

"This is an important step in making high-quality health information available to professionals, researchers and the general public," said Professor N K Ganguly, director general of ICMR. "Anyone in India with access to the Internet will now be able to use what is regarded as the world's best single source of evidence on the effects of different forms of health care."

"There is no doubt that this funded provision to The Cochrane Library will help bring Evidence- Based Medicine to the forefront of medical practice in India," added Professor Prathap Tharyan from the Professor Bhooshanam V Moses Centre for Clinical Trials and Evidence Based Medicine at Christian Medical College, Vellore. "The South Asian Cochrane Centre is privileged to be actively involved in helping shape the future of medicine in India," according to Prof Tharyan.

Through several provisions and funding schemas, the Cochrane Library is currently freely available in many geographic areas of the world including Australia, Norway, Ireland, parts of Canada and many other countries, regions and territories. All countries in Latin and Central America and Caribbean and several other developing countries in many parts of Africa and Asia get free access thanks to internationally funded initiatives. India is the first low income country to purchase national access to this evidence based information resource for its entire people.

It produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions, and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of the effects of interventions. Data from The Cochrane Library in 2004 show that there are more than 11,500 people working within The Cochrane Collaboration in over 90 countries, half of whom are authors of Cochrane Reviews. The number of people has increased by about 20 per cent every year for the last five years. The increase in the number of contributors from low, lower-middle and upper-middle income countries has been even greater, to more than 1000 (9.3 per cent) in 2004 - up by 42 per cent since 2003, and by 248 per cent since 2000.