Power to empower must include the power to stay well

When the Bloomberg New Economy Forum met in India for the first time earlier this month, its theme was the new levers of power. Prime Minister Narendra Modi answered with a list of India’s own: digital public infrastructure that reaches every citizen, vaccines supplied to more than 100 countries, a fifth of the world’s generic medicines and more than 2,000 global capability centres. His vision, he said, was “power to empower”: power that enables rather than controls, and helps others succeed.One lever was missing from the list, and it may matter most: the health of the people who are meant to build a Viksit Bharat.The lever at risk India’s greatest source of power is its working population. Its working-age share is expected to peak around the early 2040s, after which the country will age quickly: the number of Indians aged 60 and over is projected to rise from 14.9 crore in 2022 to 34.7 crore by 2050. The demographic dividend is a window, not a permanent endowment.Chronic disease is narrowing that window. The ICMR-INDIAB study estimated that about 10.1 crore Indians have diabetes, another 13.6 crore have prediabetes and some 31.5 crore have high blood pressure. Non communicable diseases now cause about 60 per cent of deaths in India, by the government’s own estimate, and they strike Indians in their working years. A widely cited study by the World Economic Forum and the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that non-communicable diseases and mental health conditions could cost India more than $4 trillion in lost output between 2012 and 2030. A workforce that grows sick before it grows old cannot deliver the dividend it promises.ET OnlineIndia has done this before No country is better placed to respond, because India has already shown what it can do. CoWIN managed more than 220 crore vaccine doses, at a speed and scale few countries could match, and India then offered the platform to the world as free, open-source software. The lesson of CoWIN is that India can build health infrastructure for a billion people faster than almost anyone, and then share it.Much of the foundation for the next step already exists. By July 2026, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission had created nearly 94 crore ABHA health IDs and linked more than 105 crore health records, with 5.33 lakh health facilities and 9.85 lakh health professionals registered. Linked records doubled from 50 crore to 100 crore in just 15 months. The Forum’s own programme described India’s public infrastructure as spanning payments, identity and health records, a data-rich foundation for artificial intelligence.ET OnlineFrom vaccination to prevention What is missing is the step from recording care to preventing illness. Today a digital health record mostly documents what has already happened. A prevention layer built on the same rails would use consented records, and the AI tools now available, to identify people whose risk is rising, such as a blood sugar reading creeping upward, blood pressure drifting out of control or a prescription not refilled, and route them to follow-up before a crisis. It is the logic of the vaccination drive applied to chronic disease: find the person, act early and track the outcome.One Forum presentation was titled “We’re Watching the Wrong AI Race”, asking what happens when building more powerful AI is no longer the hard part. For India, much of the answer lies here. The decisive contest may not be to build the most powerful models, but to put AI to work where it changes the most lives, and few uses matter more than keeping a young workforce well.That will work only if people trust it. Several of the Forum’s business leaders, among them Noubar Afeyan, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Sunil Mittal, called for tighter safeguards on AI. In health, the case is strongest of all. Consent must be specific, revocable and enforced, and health data must never be used to deny anyone insurance, a job or a welfare benefit. India’s data protection law and the digital mission’s consent architecture provide the basis. The task is to make them real in practice.Share it, as CoWIN was shared India has signed digital public infrastructure agreements with 24 countries, UPI is now live in more than eight, and India Stack Global offers partner nations 18 of the country’s digital platforms. A consent-first prevention platform could become its next contribution to the Global South, where most of the world’s deaths from chronic disease now occur. It would give practical meaning to the Prime Minister’s call for “One Earth, One Health”, and to his “power to help others succeed”.What India should do 1. Count health as a measure of national power. Track healthy life expectancy and the share of diabetes and hypertension under control, district by district, and publish them each year alongside the targets for growth under Viksit Bharat.2. Build a consent-first prevention layer on the digital mission. Turn health records into triggers for action, with consent-based identification of rising risk and follow-up before people need a hospital. People must be able to see, control and withdraw their data, it must never be used against them in insurance or employment, and independent oversight should enforce both.3. Upskill a prevention workforce. Train ASHAs, nurses, pharmacists and allied health graduates to act on risk alerts: to follow people up, adjust care within agreed protocols and keep them on treatment, supported by AI tools. India is training millions of young people in digital and AI skills; a prevention system would create real demand for them in every district, in jobs that AI makes possible rather than replaces.4. Treat prevention as an asset, not a cost. In budget terms, most health spending is booked as revenue expenditure, a running cost, while highways and chip plants count as capital expenditure that builds assets. Prevention belongs in the second column. Its digital and primary-care infrastructure should be funded as capital outlay, alongside the AI and semiconductor missions, and a healthier workforce counted as an addition to the nation’s human capital. On the national balance sheet, a healthy population is an asset that earns; untreated chronic disease is a liability that compounds.5. Offer it to the world. Open-source the prevention layer, as CoWIN was, through India Stack Global and the country’s digital public infrastructure partnerships.The power that makes the others possible The Prime Minister asked what power is for. India’s chips, data centres and capability centres will be built, staffed and run by people, and every lever on his list depends on a workforce healthy enough to use it. India has the infrastructure to build a prevention system, the scale to prove it and the habit of sharing what it builds. Power to empower must begin with the power to stay well.The author is a Boston-based scientist, serial entrepreneur, innovator, and investor. Views are their own.(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)