Developing the National Knowledge Platform in India: a policy and institutional analysis

Veena Sriram, Sara Bennett, V. R. Raman, Kabir Sheikh

The importance of strong engagement between researchers and decision-makers in the improvement of health systems is increasingly being recognised in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In 2013, in India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare began exploring the formation of a National Knowledge Platform (NKP) for guiding and supporting public health and health systems research in the country. The development of the NKP represents an important opportunity to enhance the linkage between policy-makers and researchers from the health policy and systems research field in India. However, the development process also reflects the highly complex reality of policy-making in the Indian health sector. Our objective is to provide insight into the policy-making process for establishing a health sector knowledge platform in India, and in doing so, to analyse the enabling contextual factors, the interests and actions of stakeholders, and the varying institutional arrangements explored in the development of the NKP. We used a qualitative case study methodology, conducting 16 in-depth interviews and reviewing 42 documents. We utilised General Thematic Analysis to analyse our data. Our research team combined perspectives from both outsiders (independent researchers with no prior or current involvement with the policy) and insiders (researchers involved in the policy-making process). We found that enabling contextual factors, and a combination of government and non-governmental stakeholders with core interests in public health and health systems, were able to gain considerable momentum in moving the idea for the NKP forward. However, complex evidence-to-policy processes in the Indian health sector resulted in complications in determining the right institutional arrangement for the platform. Establishing the appropriate balance between legitimacy and independence, as well as frequent changes in institutional leadership, were found to be additional issues that stakeholders contended with in building the NKP. As interest in platforms linking health sector policy-makers and researchers grows in LMICs, our findings may allow stakeholders to learn from the Indian experience thus far, and to anticipate some of the facilitators and barriers that could potentially arise in establishing such mechanisms.