John Snow IndiaPrivate Limited
Urban health systems, built on immunization expertise
In India’s rapidly growing cities, a child can live a short walk from a health facility and still miss life-saving vaccines. While primary healthcare infrastructure is widely available and aggregate city averages often look promising, overall coverage numbers mask concentrated pockets of zero-dose and under-immunized children. As urban India expands toward 600 million people by 2036, rapid growth continues to push informal settlements, migrant workers, and peri-urban communities outside traditional health microplanning.
These coverage gaps persist not because of vaccine shortages, but because urban health delivery is not built for urban complexities. Unlisted settlements remain absent from health facility catchment maps. For daily-wage earning families, rigid clinic hours force an impossible trade-off between a child’s vaccination and a lost day’s income. At the same time, high population mobility and health records fragmented across UPHCs, U-WIN, medical colleges, and private providers create system blind spots where zero-dose clusters remain invisible.
JSIPL works with the Government systems to build resilient, data-driven urban health structures under the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM), ensuring no child is left behind.
Our urban health work rests on three interdependent pillars, each delivered through government platforms and designed for institutionalisation.
We optimize existing platforms like Urban Ayushman Arogya Mandirs and outreach sessions. Furthermore, we support stronger collaboration between State Health Departments, Urban Local Bodies, and city administrations to develop robust City Health Action Plans.
We empower community platforms such as Mahila Arogya Samitis (MAS) and Jan Arogya Samitis (JAS) to track missed children, build community trust, mobilize caregivers, and address local barriers to vaccination.
We utilize spatial analytics, GIS vulnerability mapping, and human-centered design to develop context-specific solutions. Effective models are embedded directly into government plans and scaled across urban health architectures.
Transforming selected UPHCs into model hubs for integrated microplanning, zero dose and defaulter tracking, and service delivery, generating actionable frameworks for systemwide replication.
Restructuring outreach delivery into integrated platforms that combine routine immunization with antenatal care and nutrition services. We introduce community-centric session timings and geotagged locations to reliably reach informal settlements, daily-wage earners, and mobile populations.
Applying GIS and spatial analysis to map unlisted settlements, pinpoint coverage gaps, and enable direct vaccinator deployment in high-priority zero-dose clusters.
Translating urban health evidence into shared priorities, joint municipal budgets, and coordinated interventions across Health Departments, Urban Local Bodies, and local stakeholders.
Leveraging community networks and local women leaders to identify zero-dose clusters, channel grievances, and close last-mile demand gaps.
Explore how we attained 95% immunization coverage in urban areas of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha.
