Dr Sukriti Chauhan, an INLAKS scholar, is a trained lawyer with a Masters in International Development Law and Human Rights from the Warwick University, UK. She has close to a decade of advocacy and communications expertise in public health and human rights. She started her career with PATH, India, working closely on HIV/AIDS, sexual reproductive health, cervical cancer prevention and maternal and child health.
As a Director at Global Health Strategies, Sukriti led the Tuberculosis Control and Prevention Project, resulting in national-level policy changes and campaigns, as well as set up the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative in India. Sukriti worked closely with the Indian Council of Medical Research to set up a Communications Unit to build the capacity of scientists to effectively and credibly relay scientific evidence to the public and key decision-makers. She also spearheaded the implementation of a champions-based strategy to create an enabling environment for the uptake of family planning services with a focus on spacing and access to the basket of contraceptive choices, with a rights-based perspective in six states in India.
Most recently she led a consortium of ten Indian partners at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) focused on adolescent health, nutrition and child protection and also drafted a five-year strategy for India Health Fund- set up by Tata Trusts focused on tuberculosis and malaria.
Sukriti has recently been awarded her PhD titled ‘Legal and Social Impact of HIV/AIDS on Abandoned Housewives in Kolkata and Delhi’ from the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has presented and published her work at the global and national level. She started her first NGO for abandoned HIV positive women in the year 2000, is a trained Indian classical singer and an avid animal rights activist.