Tata Trusts said on Tuesday that they have opened a healthcare impact lab in IIT Delhi, with a U.S.-based international non-governmental organisation, PATH, to focus on building affordable medical devices for use by grass-roots health workers.
“We will bring our expertise on research and they will bring in global expertise in the healthcare domain,” Manoj Kumar, head of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Tata Trusts, said in a telephone interview from New Delhi. “We will incubate start-ups and ideas, especially meant for people at the bottom of the pyramid and underserved communities.” The lab will work on areas such as nutrition, child health, paternal health and communicable diseases, Mr. Kumar said.
“India’s public healthcare is struggling in most areas. We will create a curated list of big problems that we have in this country in the lab, which can be solved, and then run grand challenges to bring various stakeholders to run those grand challenges in the areas of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases,” he said.
The lab will incubate start-ups with science and technology-based ideas.
“Today we are announcing the intent and the expertise that the two organisations bring together. We are basing it out of IIT Delhi as we have access to their research ecosystem. PATH brings global experience in public health. It will give us a little more strength in terms of expertise so that we can make our incubators much more impactful.”
Tata Trusts, headed by Rata Tata, consists of Ratan Tata and Allied Trusts and Dorabji Tata Trust and Allied Trusts.
