Health in India is one of the top most social sector priorities for development and to pave the path for quality life for people. India has witnessed a paradigm shift in its health policy from its erstwhile emphasis on family planning/maternal health to tackling some other major issues of delivering proper health services and enhancing health institution/infrastructure as a whole. The annual expenditure on Health by the government of India has experienced an increase of 1 % to 2% of the GDP in XIth five year plans. New area specific health policies have been introduced to combat life threatening disease, like AIDS, Polio, TB. This is because of the prevalence of high fertility and mortality rates, problems of maternal health, unaffordable private health and poor quality public health care system in both rural – urban areas and the need for proper research and development to fight against the mounting and rising cases of AIDS, Diarrhoea and other such life threatening disease. Amidst such a scenario, one of the grave challenges emerging before India is with respect to managing and planning health policy as per these holistic dimensions. Since health in India is directly linked to the issue of poverty plaguing in huge mass of population especially those in rural areas and urban slums such that it affects the accessibility and quality healthcare services to people.

Given such a dismal state of health affairs from all quarter, the government of India has pumped up budgetary allocation for various health programmes – especially NHRM, NHP, ICDS to almost 3 folds in the current XIth Five Year plan, by raising the share of health expenditure in GDP to almost 2% from 1.2 % in the previous plan. The aim being to strengthen and scale up core areas of health areas through health programmes. One of them being NRHM (2005-12), which comes out to be a more Sustainable (integrated) health development model focusing on health delivery infrastructure, sanitation/hygiene to reviving the old and new techniques of health care in rural areas along with building community based skilled women health development workers. Also, one of the major successes of these programmes is its shift from narrow family planning (population) perspective to a more holistic health management approach for ensuring quality health access to all, especially in rural areas and BPL population. The same pertains to ICDS scheme which is launched in keeping children as a specific target group who suffer from under nutrition and malnutrition. The uniqueness of this scheme is its integration with school education for health development programme. The other health schemes that could be explored from SD perspective are – Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana, Janani Suraksha Yojana and the currently proposed National Health Bill.

In such a scenario, potential of ESD can be explored in the following manner to bridge the gap of an inbuilt idea of sustainable health reforms and its implementation. The gap emerges primarily due to lack of capacity building among all health workers/agents, knowledge sharing and realisation of possible sustainable thinking in operation of health reforms in both rural and urban areas. It is at this point that education could play twin important role in realising of quality life (MDGs) and health reforms in context of India . This can be conceptualised in the following manner-