The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh will launch the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) in New Delhi today. The PHFI, modelled on the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine in the United States will be an autonomous public health foundation jointly promoted through a public-private partnership.

The Foundation is expected to act as an adviser to the government and public-health schools, set national accreditation standards, design a more rewarding career path for public-health professionals, and seek to improve public-health education by building new schools and upgrading capabilities in existing ones.

According to McKinsey, the agency that has worked with the Prime Minister's Office, the Planning Commission, and the Union Health Minister to develop the foundation, PHFI plans to finance and launch two new public-health schools in India during the next two years. At these and other institutions and educators should intensify the focus on academic rigor, real-world experience, and field internships so that professionals are more prepared for India's public-health realities.

McKinsey noted that the foundation's autonomy would help to promote a system that fosters professionalism and ensure that the selection of public-health personnel is based on merit. Such a system will encourage a virtuous cycle in which an increasingly specialized public-health community improves India's schools and, in turn, makes the field more attractive to practitioners, it hopes.

Commenting on the status of Indian public health institutions, McKinsey had noted that India has 95 public-health institutions, which produce only about 375 professionals a year, or about 4 from each school; even the top schools graduate just 10 to 15 a year. By contrast, both Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School produce nearly 200 public-health specialists annually. "The typical curriculum at Indian public-health schools is overly theoretical, outdated, and out of touch with the latest thinking on epidemiology, health economics, and mass communication. Practical internships are limited in number, and a shortage of faculty makes matters worse. Furthermore, some schools suffer from a lack of academic rigor and prestige and so are often filled by students who have few other career options," McKinsey report pointed out.

It felt that the country should establish new public-health institutes, with the aim of replicating the achievements of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management.