PSI India

PSI India is an Indian non-governmental organisation. Since 1988 it has worked with governments to make healthcare accessible, affordable, scalable and of good quality for underserved communities. It describes itself as a local NGO with expertise in programme implementation, planning and policy, research and evaluation, knowledge management, and social and behaviour change communication and strategy.

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It also develops market-based solutions and uses technology and partnerships to help health services reach underserved people. Much of its work is technical support to public health systems at state, district and city level, including training providers, improving the use of routine data, raising facility quality and building coordination between departments.

Headquarters: New Delhi, Delhi, India

Major Areas of Work

• Family Planning: Widening access to contraceptive services and improving their quality in public and private facilities, including postpartum family planning and long-acting methods.

• Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH+A): Strengthening reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health services, from preventing and managing childhood diarrhoea to upgrading labour and delivery rooms.

• Urban and Primary Healthcare: Strengthening urban primary health centres through coaching, data-driven reviews, quality assurance, facility mapping and coordination between city departments.

• Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: Behaviour change communication on WASH, and support to urban local bodies on faecal sludge management and on enrolling sanitation workers in social security schemes.

• Tuberculosis and Non-Communicable Diseases: Screening communities for TB, along with work on non-communicable diseases.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• The Challenge Initiative (TCI) India: A family planning programme in which PSI India coaches city and district health teams to scale up high-impact interventions until they graduate from direct support and carry the work on themselves.

• Diarrhoea Se Darr Nahi: A childhood diarrhoea initiative that supports the Uttar Pradesh government's Stop Diarrhoea Campaign, including training health workers in prevention and management.

• SBI-Maatrichhaya Project: Upgrades labour and delivery room (LDR) units at community health centres in Uttar Pradesh to improve maternal and newborn care.

• Swachh Uday: A WASH programme that runs behaviour change communication activities on sanitation and hygiene.

• TB-STRIVE: A tuberculosis programme that screens people for TB in Uttar Pradesh.

• Maitri-Vidya: An education programme that identifies out-of-school girls in Deoria district, Uttar Pradesh.

Under The Challenge Initiative India, PSI India works with city and district health teams to build provider skills, use routine HMIS data for decisions, and hold regular review and coordination meetings. Sites receive direct support for a set period and then graduate, continuing the interventions on their own. Health officials in Uttar Pradesh and Odisha credit the approach with steady growth in family planning clients after graduation. Officials in Odisha say its results helped them argue for more IUCD training under the National Health Mission.

Impact

PSI India's own site cites 1.5 million family planning clients benefitted through The Challenge Initiative India, 15,450 health workers trained on childhood diarrhoea under Diarrhoea Se Darr Nahi, 99,554 people screened for TB in Uttar Pradesh under TB-STRIVE, 39,710 people reached through WASH behaviour change activities under Swachh Uday, and 3,500 out-of-school girls identified in Deoria through Maitri-Vidya. Government officials quoted by the organisation also credit its support with helping Basantpur UPHC in Gorakhpur become the first urban primary health centre in Uttar Pradesh to achieve National Quality Assurance Standards status.

Partners

• Government: Health and family welfare departments and district health teams in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh, the National Urban Health Mission, and urban local bodies including Lucknow Nagar Nigam and Pithampur Municipal Council.

• Corporate, industry and academic: SBI, Bayer, Kenvue, Genpact, HCL, CII, PHDCCI and IIHMR.

PSI India suits people who want to work on public health at the scale of whole systems, working inside government rather than alongside it. Staff work closely with district health officers, urban health missions and municipal bodies, which builds first-hand knowledge of how India's public health system plans, reviews and delivers services. Its work mixes programme implementation, research and evaluation, behaviour change communication and market-based approaches, giving exposure across several functions. Programmes run in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. It is a good fit for public health professionals, data and monitoring specialists, and communication or WASH practitioners who are comfortable with field-heavy work that involves government.