Samayita Ghosh

Samayita Ghosh is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Health Analytics Research and Trends (CHART), Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University and the Centre for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC). She has worked on assessing and evaluating programmes on WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene), education, youth and governance, and child labour across multiple states in India. Some of her engagements include rapid assessment of water and sanitation facilities, and evaluation of the best performing five states with respect to the overall achievement of the Swachh Bharat goals for Water Aid, India; an RCT (randomised controlled trial) study focusing on closing the child labour and forced labour evidence gaps, funded by the US Department of Labour; uptake of digital adherence technologies in tuberculosis programme for Government of India and USAID, campaign evaluation at the Kumbh Mela (Nashik) for Wash United, Berlin; formative and needs assessment research on children for Sesame Street Initiative; baseline assessment for Save the Children’s programme on empowerment of girl child; mapping youth perceptions on politics, education, and internationalism with the British Council; among others. At PHFI, her work is primarily focused on the intersections of social and behavioural determinants of environmental exposures and associated health risks. She was a recipient of the Krishna Raj Fellowship in 2012 at the Centre for Development Economics and has been a short-term scholar at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, being trained in environmental epidemiology and exposure assessments. She completed her Master’s in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics (DSE).

She initiated a cognitive learning programme in public schools that would intuitively engage students into understanding the inter-relatedness of water, sanitation and hygiene, and early childhood exposure through various experimental programmes which was recently featured by The Economist in a study commissioned by the Reckitt Global Hygiene Institute and has been recently funded for digitization by UNICEF for children and adolescents in Uttar Pradesh.

With a decade of experience in the WASH space, she currently manages the Centre for Environmental Health at the Public Health Foundation of India’s WASH portfolio and other environmental determinants. She was involved in developing an Indo-Israel consortium on emerging pollutants in water and health effects. Among other functions, she also led the development of a Climate Resilient Water Safety Planning course for WHO SEARO. She was also a member of an expert interdisciplinary committee appointed by the Government of Andhra Pradesh appointed to investigate the “Acute Neurological outbreak” in Eluru. Currently, she is a co-investigator and programme coordinator of a trial assessing the effectiveness of air purifiers on heart failure outcomes jointly funded by NIH and ICMR.