India marks One Health on 3 November to link human, animal, and environmental care. The approach is vital as lumpy skin disease recently hit many districts, while plague risks persist globally. Experts said, "between animal and human medicine there is no dividing line," urging better unity to stop future outbreaks.
In the second of his Major Rock Edicts, cut into stone in the third century BCE, Ashoka records that he has provided medical care of two kinds, for people and for animals, and has had healing herbs planted wherever they were lacking. Twenty-three centuries before the phrase existed, an Indian state treated the health of humans, animals and the land as a single charge of government. Rudolf Virchow, who introduced the word "zoonosis", restated the idea for the age of the microscope: between animal and human medicine there is no dividing line, nor should there be.
Modern governance, however, forgot what Ashoka and Virchow knew. It allotted people to one ministry, livestock to another and forests to a third. Pathogens, which recognise no such allocation of business, have exploited the gaps ever since. One Health, which the world marks on 3 November, is the effort to recover that lost unity with the tools of the 21st century by bringing human, animal and environmental health into a common framework for research, surveillance and prevention. The Indian philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, which regards the world as one family, resonates with this understanding of interconnected life. This year the case makes itself. Lumpy skin disease (LSD) has returned to India. The September forecast from ICAR-NIVEDI's early-warning system placed 219 districts across 28 states and Union Territories at risk, and Rajasthan had recorded more than 10,400 cases in ten eastern districts by mid-September.
In Siberia, a young technician at Irkutsk's anti-plague institute died in early October of what Russian authorities called pneumonia of unknown cause, amid reports of pneumonic plague. Nearly 200 people were placed under observation. Whatever the final diagnosis, Yersinia pestis, the organism of the Black Death, has never left us. It persists in rodents and their fleas, from the marmots of the Central Asian steppe to the prairie dogs of New Mexico and the rats of Madagascar. Neither story respects a departmental boundary. LSD does not infect people, but it drains milk cans, household incomes and children's nutrition. Plague is at once a problem of wildlife ecology, laboratory biosafety, clinical medicine and public trust. About three-quarters of emerging human infections originate in animals. India, with 1.4 billion people, some 536 million livestock and the world's largest milk output, sits at the centre of this arithmetic.
An ICMR-National Institute of Epidemiology analysis found that 583 of 6,948 outbreaks reported between 2018 and 2023 were zoonotic: about seven every month, peaking with the monsoon. India bears about a third of the world's rabies deaths, and the LSD wave of 2022-23 killed more than 1.6 lakh cattle. The economics are equally unambiguous. The World Bank puts One Health-guided prevention at $10.3-11.5 billion a year globally, against roughly $30 billion a year for managing pandemics, with returns of up to 86 per cent. Prevention stays under-financed for a reason economists understand well: its dividend is a non-event, and non-events win neither headlines nor budgets.
India has chosen to invest ahead of the crisis. On the advice of the Prime Minister's Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council in 2022, the government created the National One Health Mission, which convenes 16 ministries and departments under the Principal Scientific Adviser. ICMR anchors its research programme, with an approved outlay of Rs 386.86 crore, and a dedicated National Institute of One Health at Nagpur will spearhead the Mission. The architecture is producing results. A national network of BSL-3 laboratories now spans the human and animal sectors.
A National Joint Outbreak Response Team links health, livestock and wildlife officials and has been tested in national drills: Vishanu Yuddh Abhyas at Ajmer in 2024, and Pashujanya Yuddh Abhyas at Vidisha this summer, which simulated animal influenza spilling over to people and wildlife. ICAR developed the indigenous Lumpi-ProVacInd vaccine, and more than 28 crore animals have been vaccinated against LSD since 2022. India carried One Health into its G20 presidency under the banner of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, and the WHO Pandemic Agreement adopted in May 2025 commits its signatories to the approach.
What remains is the harder labour of translation: from a sound national design to the daily routine of every district. Kenya, Rwanda, Thailand, Brazil and Bangladesh have each built One Health machinery, and their experience yields three lessons. Co-location works better than correspondence. A legal mandate outlasts enthusiasm. Coordination must reach the district, enlist the community and own a budget line. Five reforms would carry the Mission to the district: Subsidiarity: The sick calf, the feverish child and the dead crow are first noticed in a village, not in the capital. Every state needs a One Health cell under the Chief Secretary. Every district needs a standing committee under the Collector that seats the chief medical officer, the chief veterinary officer and the divisional forest officer at one table, with a joint rapid-response protocol.
Fiscal visibility: A One Health statement in Union and state budgets, on the model of gender budgeting, would show what is spent across departments. A pooled contingency fund that either department may trigger would end the costly dispute over who pays for the first week of an outbreak. Interoperable data: Human, livestock, wildlife and environmental surveillance must speak to one another through common standards, with a public dashboard as proof. A joint frontline: ASHAs, pashu sakhis, para-vets and forest guards should share training and a single reporting application. Measurement and regulation: A One Health index for states and districts should be published annually, on the lines of the Aspirational Districts ranking. Approvals for veterinary and human countermeasures need a single window. And as our high-containment network expands, its biosafety standards must expand with it. None of this is hypothetical.
In Odisha's Koraput district, a One Health model for anthrax prevention, developed between 2022 and 2025, is now being scaled up in Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. In Khordha, JEEVOne, a mobile platform developed by ICMR's Bhubaneswar institute, lets frontline workers report human and animal health signals through a single application. Odisha, incidentally, is where India first reported LSD in 2019. For the scientist, One Health is an epistemology before it is a programme. Emergence happens at the interfaces between species and habitats, where a virologist, a veterinarian, an ecologist and a data scientist must interrogate the same sample. Genomics is their common grammar.
In a plague scare, sequencing can establish within days whether an isolate is wild or laboratory-derived, substituting evidence for rumour. Metagenomics of wastewater, soil and animal samples can find the pathogens nobody thought to look for. The frontier this opens is wide: platform technologies that can deliver countermeasures within 100 days of a new threat; an indigenous Kyasanur Forest Disease vaccine being developed by ICMR with Indian Immunologicals; multiplex diagnostics equally at home in a primary health centre and a veterinary dispensary; and predictive models that fuse climate, vector and land-use data. ICMR now funds multi-centre One Health projects of up to Rs 25 crore.
The scarcest resource, however, is human: our scientists literate at once in a genome, an ecosystem and a community. Finally, One Health will be won or lost in the household, where the cow, the kitchen and the child share a courtyard. Reach the mother at the anganwadi and the self-help group, and the father at the milk collection centre and the gram sabha. The message fits on a single page: boil milk, vaccinate the dog and the calf, wash hands after tending animals, never give leftover antibiotics to livestock, and report a sick animal or a dead bird as promptly as a fever.
Children, as the sanitation and polio campaigns showed, are the surest carriers of new habits. One Health belongs in the science textbook, the eco-club and the work of school Health and Wellness Ambassadors, brought alive by a pet-vaccination day, a village animal census and the Mission's own One Health comic. A child who learns why the calf is vaccinated will remind the parent who forgot.
No one cuts a ribbon on an outbreak averted, so let every district publish a One Health scorecard each 3 November, giving citizens a number to watch and a way to count what did not happen. The cow in a Rajasthan shed, the flea on a steppe marmot and the sequencer in Nagpur belong to a single story, one that Ashoka's stonecutters would have recognised. India has the mission, the institutions and the science to tell it well. The work ahead is to make One Health the ordinary way in which government acts and science discovers.
(The writers are, respectively, a Senior Technocrat and Policy Specialist, and a Senior Physician Scientist and Public Health administrator. Views are personal)