‘Rural women-led community action is key to tackling India’s metabolic diseases’

Rural women and community institutions were positioned as key drivers of India’s response to the growing burden of obesity and metabolic diseases at a panel discussion on public private collaboration held at AIG Hospitals, Hyderabad on Thursday, December 18.

The discussion, titled The Public-Private Collaboration to Tackle the Metabolic Crisis, was moderated by Dr Rakesh Kalapala, Director of the Centre for Obesity and Metabolic Therapy at AIG Hospitals. The panel brought together Telangana Commissioner of Civil Supplies Stephen Raveendra; Chief Executive Officer of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), Telangana, Divya Devarajan; Executive Director of Heritage Foods Nara Brahmani; Executive Director of Granules India Uma Chigurupati; and Chief Executive Officer of AIG Hospitals SAM Rizvi.

Opening the session, Dr Kalapala said that with metabolic disease emerging as a silent pandemic driven by changing food habits, stress and sedentary lifestyles across both urban and rural India, solutions would have to extend beyond hospitals and involve governance, industry and community institutions.

Placing rural women at the centre of the discussion, Ms Devarajan said government food systems and welfare programmes had played a decisive role in shaping dietary patterns over decades. “Large-scale distribution of polished rice through the public distribution system had gradually displaced traditional diets based on millets such as jowar and ragi, which are nutritionally richer and have a lower glycaemic index. While such policies were necessary at a time of food scarcity, the present context of self-sufficiency offered an opportunity to rethink food baskets,” she said.

Addressing the role of law enforcement and public servants, Mr Raveendra said metabolic disease directly affected productivity and operational readiness, particularly among police personnel who work under high stress, irregular hours and limited access to healthy food.

From the food industry perspective, Ms Brahmani said India’s demographic advantage could turn into a liability if childhood obesity and metabolic disorders were not addressed. “Nutrition in early life would determine the country’s future health outcomes. Food processing companies have a responsibility to protect nutritional value at the source, beginning with farmer education and extending to the use of technologies that prevent nutrient loss during processing,” she added.

Ms Chigurupati said the pharmaceutical industry was moving away from treatment alone towards prevention and personalised healthcare. She said that early diagnostics, science-backed nutraceuticals, wearable technologies, genomics and artificial intelligence were increasingly shaping how metabolic risk was identified even before disease onset.

Summing up the healthcare system’s role, Mr Rizvi described metabolic disorders such as diabetes, hypertension and fatty liver disease as silent conditions that accumulate damage over time and impose heavy personal, organisational and economic costs. “Tertiary care hospitals have a responsibility to build awareness, engage with policymakers, invest in research and develop evidence-based preventive health check-ups,” he added.