The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) have jointly launched a national mission-mode programme, “SEHAT: Science Excellence for Health through Agricultural Transformation”, to integrate agriculture, nutrition and public health in India formally. Unveiled in New Delhi by Union Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda and Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, SEHAT is positioned as a “historic step” in India’s shift from a curative to a preventive and holistic health system, with agriculture recognised as a key determinant of population health.
Under the mission, SEHAT will focus on five priority pillars: developing and evaluating biofortified and nutrient-dense crops to tackle malnutrition; promoting integrated farming systems to improve dietary diversity and farmer income; addressing occupational health risks among agricultural workers; advancing agriculture-enabled strategies to prevent and manage non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and cancer; and strengthening One Health preparedness through integrated surveillance, diagnostics and research at the human–animal–environment interface. The initiative aims to generate robust evidence, scalable models and a data-driven framework to inform policy and programme design, aligning agricultural research and innovation with national nutrition and health goals.
Speaking at the launch, Nadda said India has moved from dependence on imported technologies to indigenous, data-driven innovations and stressed that financial resources would not be a constraint for outcome-oriented, low-cost, high-quality solutions in diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. He underlined the need for a whole-of-government and whole-of-system approach that integrates science, policy, and implementation, and highlighted SEHAT as a model of inter-sectoral convergence between the health and agriculture sectors. Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan called the collaboration “unprecedented and historic”, emphasising that aligning what the country grows with what people need to eat is essential to address both undernutrition and the rising burden of lifestyle diseases, and reiterated that “food can become medicine” with the right production and consumption choices.
ICMR Director General Dr Rajiv Bahl noted that India is facing a dual burden of undernutrition and overnutrition alongside increasing non-communicable diseases, and argued that agriculture must evolve beyond food production to become a driver of nutrition and health outcomes. He said SEHAT is expected to strengthen inter-sectoral convergence, improve dietary diversity, support prevention and management of chronic diseases, and enhance contributions to the National One Health Mission through integrated surveillance and joint research. Senior officials, including Minister of State for Agriculture Bhagirath Choudhary and ICAR leadership, were present at the launch, underscoring the political and institutional backing for the mission.
