The potential of telemedicine is well observed during the pandemic time as several consultations with doctors/health experts happened without going to the clinic or hospital. This was a positive sign and urges to look into new business models to help further telemedicine across the world. On this front, it is a time to encourage companies to come to the forefront with a wide range of tech-driven digital healthcare tools and products. It was predicted by the health industry experts that tele-health market across the world is likely to witness a massive spike both from the demand and supply sides. The service providers are assessing capacities and avenues, pursuing evidence-based innovations and technologies across the board, including diagnostic and telemedicine tools, cellphone apps for fitness, well-being, medical and healthcare, and data-driven software. But the argument is that maybe it is the pandemic which compelled to explore and extend these technologies to deal with the special and temporal gaps to access healthcare. The concern shall be to look into how these technologies and innovations will be used in a post-covid world to deal with public health issues. How in coming days, technologies and innovations will be integrated with public health response system for greater accessibility and affordability to health care services should be a priority area of research in public health studies. The pandemic has unraveled the myriad avenues and opportunities in boosting healthcare and life sciences in the world, it would be interesting to look into how health shall be observed as wealth in the post Covid world with technology and innovations as its greatest investment. The challenge in a post-Covid world will be to validate the new technologies and innovations without assuming that they will work because they worked in an uncontrolled emergency situation during the pandemic. This requires new observations regarding the adoption and use of digital health tools and services to receive information and seek social and medical assistance and support in a post-covid world when again the people will have physical access to socio-economic infrastructure, facilities and services. The concern will be to look into how medium and low-income countries will refocus on preventive healthcare in a post-covid world with diverse and massive population, with disproportionate health infrastructure that often impacts medical responses to health emergency situations. When the world will regain its feet in post-covid realties, the challenge will be to recalibrate public health strategies with the help of emerging digital healthcare technologies to strengthen preventive healthcare. Investigations are required to explore the role of government in incentivizing and encouraging healthcare industries to deal with the issues of post-covid safety and care. The integration of health technologies and innovations into health policies and response strategies could be one of the concerned areas of research in post-covid world. The understanding of comprehensive responses of countries that have been successful to deal with covid through the timely and effective deployment of health technologies to facilitate planning, surveillance, testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and clinical management will help other countries to improve their health strategies and response systems.  

In any climate action, one of the prime concerns is to engage communities to mitigate climate change. Whether it is a large organization, small collective or even a civil society organization, facilitating dialogues between citizens and governments and mobilizing communities to increase their participation in climate consultations is a challenging task.   In middle and low income countries, lack of awareness about the process and difficulty in understanding policy documents limits community participation in climate consultations. Raising awareness about public consultations ensures that communities are engaged in the decision-making process. Generally, communities don’t participate in public consultations as they aren’t aware that their participation plays an important role in the process of policy implications. Disseminating information on how to participate in public consultations through flyers, posters, social media and WhatsApp helps the community people and opinion leaders in sharing their experiences which can further help the policy makers in developing well rounded policies.   Another hurdle in understanding policy deliberations is the language of the policy document itself. Often it was observed that the language of the draft policy document is technical and complex and the research and data sets are difficult for the community people to comprehend. Institutional interventions are required to simplify the language of the policy draft with a clear description of how it has socio-economic impact on the people. Allowing people to discuss in their native language can make the process more participatory.   Environmentalists were using Instagram providing summaries of climate action plan supported by short videos explaining the important provisions of environmental laws and police open for public feedback on websites and social media handles and found useful in encouraging community people to participate in public consultations to help shaping climate policy decisions.   Hosting town hall meetings, creating public forums for people to share their thoughts and ideas about climate change can help to build consensus around climate action. Organizing educational campaigns about the effects of climate change and importance of taking actions is also effective in mobilizing communities. Use of social media platforms in promotion of events, sharing information and encouraging people to participate in consultations can be useful to promote sustainable practices. Showcasing of successful public consultations will help the advocacy groups to convince the government about the importance of positive and sustainable community engagement in climate policy-making. Government partners need to be encouraged to publish the results of public consultations regularly to promote transparency, accountability and legitimacy in the policy making process. Publishing explainer blogs, opinion pieces and small narratives based on learning from experiences will help the common people to understand the impact of the proposed changes on their lives in reality thus allowing them to respond on policy documents. Mediums beyond text-based communications of blog and opinion pieces, such as videos, podcasts are also useful to take the policy concerns to a larger audience. The new social concepts like live reporting, narratives and conversations between domain experts and stakeholders will be useful in understanding the different aspects of climate policies. All these collaborative actions are useful in mobilizing communities to effectively participate in climate consultations.      

Over the decades, fashion has evolved as a form of self-identity expression and an integral part of an individuals’ personality. However, seldom do people think about how their fashion choices impact the environment and its inhabitants. According to Mahatma Gandhi, “there is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.” This sentiment aptly echoes in the current discourse around the promotion of sustainable fashion choices. There are several factors that influence an individual’s fashion choices, such as improved access to technology through social media platforms and websites, social norms as a result of socialization, psychological, economic and, aesthetic aspects to name a few. Sustainable fashion comprises of environmental friendly ways to design, manufacture, distribute, and use clothing. Globally, the unsustainable ways of production by fast fashion industries have played a significant role in the present state of the world with increasing environmental threats posing risk to lives and causing social injustice. Clothing products meeting a primary need have continuous consumer demand from every strata of society but the style they prefer changes consistently due to change in fashion trends driven by fashion influences. For some, the trigger to buy a new cloth can be after their wear is worn and torn and for others it can be at the sight of something new making their existing wardrobe psychologically obsolete. That’s why, fashion phenomenon especially that of fast fashion expedites the psychological obsolescence. The demand for newer clothes tracts the fashion value chain to respond to market demand. More demand for clothes implies more production of clothes, fabric, yarn, fibre and the like. Thus, in the fast-paced competitive fashion world, brands are continuously working towards newer collections throughout the year to meet this high demand and consumption. This result in their choice of fibres and materials, dyes used, low waste design, processes which engage human resources and systems to manage industrial waste. It also implies increased requirements of resources some that are immediately irreplaceable, some that pollutes the water, air, habitat and the entire eco system. Thus, there is a compelling for consumers to alter their fashion consumption as environmentalism and equitable practices are intricately linked. Fashion brands, though are sensitive to the environmental aspects, tend to be more concerned about their bottom line of profit making. Their acts are termed as green-washing and such measures offer no solutions to climate change, biodiversity loss and other larger environmental issues. Even the so-called sustainable brands are sold at a premium, thus tilting the demand to the brands that are output of unsustainable processes. Consumers are easily lured by cheap prices offered during sale and are seldom aware that these clothes are a result of inaccurate forecasts. In other words, brands inability to dot consumers’ preferences ends up in over production and forced sales. The ones that are unsold with all those efforts end up in landfills and ocean. A study conducted in Sweden aimed to clarify what sustainable fashion meant for the Swedish fashion industry using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), to examine raw material extraction, material processing, product manufacture, distribution, use, disposal and recycling. The study found examination of scenarios which reduced the pre-user environmental burden of clothing more feasible. Another study employed the comprehensive action determination model (CADM) to identify psychological factors linked to reduce clothing consumption across five different countries. The study results showed that personal and social norms are key determinants of fashion choices. An increase in perceived personal norms potentially could be reached with focused messages, on the environmental impact of choices and the possibilities to lessen it through own reduced consumption (outcome efficacy). Many studies found that people are more  likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours when the message or context leverages psychological factors such as social influence, habits, feelings and cognition, and tangibility. While businesses shall thrive, the planet must maintain its ecological balance. The responsibility is with the industry to ensure brand transparency so that consumers are better equipped to make more ethical purchasing decisions.

The present scholarly attention on fake news is heavily western centric with limited comparative perspectives. Many of these academic narratives are primarily focused on finding technological solutions to the issue by making the networks and the algorithms more responsible. However, just addressing the technological aspect may not be a viable long-term solution to fake news, especially in media markets like India.  With several instances of Indian mainstream journalists mistaking fake news for real, it can be seen that the issue is not just proliferation, but also how it is perceived by its audience, including journalists. Any attempts to develop a pedagogic approach to tackle an issue like fake news should be situated in temporal reflexivity, which takes account of the changing contexts of the post-truth reality, rather than focusing too much on a set of the technological advancements making such phenomena like fake news possible. Attempts which seek technologically militant solutions to tackle fake news, in terms of developing algorithms or apps to do it, often lack this. This argument is not meant to downplay the immediate importance of such solutions in fighting the proliferation of fake news. However, attempts with an aggressive focus on imparting training to develop or handle such technological tools may not suffice to facilitate existing journalism education framework to adapt to post-truth realities. Technological solutions pop up and turn invalid over a short span of time unless they sustain with fast-paced updates.

Air pollution is looked upon as an emerging concern in India, as it is becoming a serious health threat for people living in densely populated towns and cities, with children and elderly being most at risk. India contains 11 out of the 20 most polluted cities in the World. Air pollution is reported every year on national dailies with stories varying from stubble burning to closing of educational institutions, but does the reportage cover crucial aspects and factors that lead to soaring air pollution in Indian cities? Despite its implications for society at large, climate change is difficult to perceive and understand for most lay audiences. As a complex and unobtrusive issue, people often encounter it via news media. The news media attention to climate change plays an important role in influencing public opinion by helping people to better understand the complexities of the issue to make their demand for action more vocal. Primafacie, air quality/air pollution and climate change are observed as two independent issues but interwoven with each other on regional and global level due to non-linear and bi-directional interactions between the two. The on-going global climate change debate is making the understanding of the problem of air quality difficult to deal with, whereas the poor air quality is enhancing the magnitude and frequency of climate change implications. With this understanding, studies are needed to look into the levels of issue attention towards climate change with an emphasis on air quality news coverage in the national editions of newspapers. Apparent movement of the sun between the tropics caused by an annual oscillation in the parameters of the sun – the earth geometry results in different seasons over a hemisphere. As extreme weather events and severely poor air-quality episodes are generally specific to a particular season. Studies need to be undertaken on stories centred on extreme weather events (heat waves, floods etc.) and air-quality deterioration episodes published in different national editions of Indian dailies. It is high time for Indian climate researchers to explore the prevalence of frames, themes, topics and dimensions (scientific, ecological and societal) in the news-media coverage of the issue and how the stories of climate change with reference to air quality coverage, perceives and reports the discussion of science and scientists in news media.

The devastating impact of Covid-19 has compelled the healthcare leaders around the world to revisit the current healthcare systems in terms of response to the crisis in the new post-pandemic reality. It requires the redesign of healthcare systems by introducing new care models to address primary, secondary and acute care. Patients are demanding continuous access to healthcare services in a safe and convenient way and also demand a more agile, inter-professional delivery of care with empowered frontline staff leveraging technology. This further need a new framework to enable healthcare organizations to orchestrate the myriad interconnected changes required to sustain virtual care. The framework needs clinical and corporate strategies to ensure full connectivity between the core clinical workflows, supporting operations and technology platforms. Here, connected health, a widely used term in public health studies,  have the capability of providing cost-effective solutions at a time when the demands on healthcare services continue to increase due to the world’s growing and ageing population, the rising costs of advanced medical treatments, and severely constrained healthcare budgets. Although the challenge is that the connected health solutions are technology-driven processes, hence, needs skill and willingness to engage with technology. This becomes crucial at a time, when the scale and pace of changes are high. Here the concerns are education and training. Education, training and widespread access to broadband technology can not only improve accessibility to connected health devices but can also be crucial in addressing gaps in our existing healthcare system. There is no doubt, that the technology has the power to improve access to healthcare services for people with mobility problems. Mobile technology is empowering patients and care givers by giving them more control over their health and making them less dependent on healthcare professionals for health information. With the help of digital technologies, they can not only search information online, but can also share their experiences and identify diagnostic and treatment options. An integrated healthcare system can exploit these technological opportunities further. Connecting patients to information, advice, and support can move the patient as a passive recipient of care to one where they are actively engaged in their own care. Despite, that the connected health covers a large number of patient care points, the two central points witnessed across the globe are – patient access to care and patient empowerment. The connected health tools in recent times have not only improved patient care access and self-efficacy, but also delivered on central tenets of patient engagement. Connected health allows patients to connect with their medical providers more quickly and conveniently than ever before. The tele-health facilities allows patients to directly speak to their providers using video-conferences and at the same time it can connect the providers with one another to share consults, expertise, and knowledge during patient care. The benefits of connected health go beyond the logistic factors also – such as, it improves the way patients interact with and perceive their healthcare. When patients manage their own health using connected health tools, patients’ empowerment and self-efficacy increase. It further put patients’ in-charge of their own care. A fitness wearable helps a patient set her own fitness goals and track her progress towards those goals. A remote patient monitoring system alerts a diabetic patient when his sugars are too high, allowing the patient to make his own adjustments. It is an appropriate time to unlock the immense potential of connected health to explore a new phase of patient centricity, where the patients are becoming more and more responsible for their own healthcare thus creating enormous opportunities for engagement.    

Schools are the best place to promote health programmes both at individual and collective level. The comprehensive and integrated environment of a school provides a good setting to encourage health promotion campaigns. The practice of health promotion in schools has been emphasized by the World Health Organization (WHO) several times in its health conventions. Studies have been undertaken by various health agencies to find out the synergy between health promotion and academic institutions and schools were identified as a preferable place to address both individual’s attitudes and behaviours. There are evidence about how a comprehensive and integrated health promotion campaign designed for schools can improve children’s health but what a health campaign promoting de-worming should constituent and how and in what ways it should be implemented in a school involving a wide range of actors is a less talked area. Engaging schools in promoting de-worming needs to look health promotion as a multi-component, context-sensitive and behaviour-change oriented intervention and shall aim to identify the socio-cultural conditions and actions leading to the implementation of de-worming programme in schools. Policy dialogues and response strategies are required to look into how and in what ways health promotion programs are implemented in Schools. What different socio-cultural factors are associated with the implementation of health promotion programmes in schools? How to conceptualize and design health interventions to promote vaccinations and immunization at schools while effectively addressing the complexities in a school setting.  

Nutrition has always been a policy priority in health studies. In recent times, many middle- and low-income countries have strengthened their nutrition policies and programs with measurable success. Recent studies provided evidence to explore how the nutrition progress in India struggled during the Covid-19 crisis and why it is an appropriate time to approach the health policy research to mitigate the adverse nutrition impacts through multi-sectoral actions to protect the vulnerable mothers and children. The Covid-19 pandemic has damaged the nutritional status of vulnerable groups through multiple mechanisms resulting in a sharp decline in dietary quality in India stemming from income losses due to government-mandated lockdowns and mobility restrictions. The suspension of food transfer schemes such as mid-day meal programs and the breakdown of food markets due to demand shock and supply constraints had seriously affected the nutrition outreach programs and schemes. The high rates of under-nutrition in the form of deficiencies in vitamins and minerals had severely affected the long-term health of women and children progressing towards increased risks of underweight, weakness and diet-related non-communicable diseases. The pandemic had raised the challenges for women and child nutrition and compels the public healthcare systems to revisit the diets, services and practices that mothers and children require to support adequate nutrition. Studies are required to undertake a rapid assessment to identify key priorities for health policy research in India within the context of maternal and child nutrition challenges.  Based on evidence from the pandemic crisis, it is a time to outline the health policy research shift require to protect the vulnerable, especially women and children, from the effects of nutritional crisis. There is a dire need of research information to shape policies by placing issues on policy agenda. It is time to explore research informed policy development and its importance in taking right decisions in terms of surveillance of vulnerable population (through surveys) and co-ordination of various stakeholders across sectors including health, agriculture, education, water and sanitation, social protection and commerce and trade. Since, malnutrition is a multidimensional problem, a clear understanding of policy shift in approaches is important to deal with the contextual issues of nutrition and how concerns are raising in a post-Covid world to identify and implement effective and affordable health interventions in Indian sub-continent.