The Jindal School of Public Health and Human Development (JSPH) is the twelfth school of O. P. Jindal Global University. JSPH has been set up to encourage innovative research and establish world-class public health education in India. Being established in 2020, JSPH begins as the world faces the greatest pandemic in a hundred years, the COVID-19 pandemic. With nearly 250 million cases and almost 5 million deaths worldwide, the future of the pandemic is still uncertain. Remarkable achievements have occurred through innovations in the development and roll-out of vaccines, although it is far from certain that this pandemic will be defeated soon or that even worse ones can be avoided. Effective public health responses and prevention are therefore more urgent than ever.
While COVID-19 is likely to come under a degree of control thanks to vaccinations, it has been a stark reminder of the limitations of our public health governance and infrastructure at multiple levels, including central, state and district. Therefore, the role of public health education has never been more important. To enable such improvement in public health education requires high-quality, world-class academic institutions that provide youth with the required tools to allow them to become thought leaders capable of bringing the desired change. Therefore, at this critical moment in history, O.P. Jindal Global University is embarking on a significant contribution to higher education in India through world-class and interdisciplinary public health education in order to provide graduate students with a degree programme that will open up exciting career paths in public health and human development.