One Earth, One Family, One Future. India said three of the words at the G20. The fourth is the one that holds the other three up. On zoonoses, surveillance and the institution India has designed but not yet built India offered the world a sentence at the G20: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam ~ One Earth, One Family, One Future. It was the right sentence, and it was incomplete. One Earth is a geography. One Family is an ethic.

One Future is an aspiration. Not one of the three survives contact with a single virus crossing from a pangolin to a farmhand in a district nobody has heard of. The word that makes the others load-bearing is One Health. There can be no One Planet without it. This is not a rhetorical flourish. Roughly six in ten known human infectious diseases and around three-quarters of emerging ones originate in animals. India holds the world’s largest livestock population, extraordinary biodiversity, dense human settlement and rapid land-use change ~ the four ingredients of spillover, concentrated in one subcontinent. If the next pandemic has a postcode, statistically it is likelier to be ours than most.

Here is the uncomfortable test. Ask a district health officer in a tier-two town what the National One Health Mission is. Ask a municipal commissioner, a block veterinary officer, a pollution control board engineer. Outside the small circle of people who sit on its committees or get invited to its symposiums, the answer is usually silence. India’s most important public health idea of this decade is currently a conversation among the converted. That is not for want of effort.

The record is genuinely creditable. The Mission was recommended by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council in 2022 and received Cabinet approval in February 2024. It is steered by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, implemented through ICMR, anchored in a new National Institute of One Health at Nagpur, and now spans more than a dozen central ministries. A BSL-3/4 laboratory network has grown to twenty-two facilities.

The Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying runs a One Health Support Unit; NCDC runs a national zoonoses programme; pilots in Karnataka and Uttarakhand have tested integration on the ground; and full-dress pandemic mock drills have been staged in Ajmer and Khandwa. States were formally convened for the first time in 2025. This is a country that has done the thinking. What India has is a mission. What India needs is an institution. The gap is not ambition or science. It is legal form. A mission created by an advisory council and sustained by a Cabinet note is an arrangement. It coordinates when........

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