Dr. Tanya Seshadri

Institute of Public Health Bengaluru (IPH) & Director, Tribal Health (India)

Tanya Seshadri is a community health practitioner and researcher and has worked with Adivasi (indigenous) people’s health through the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra (VGKK) and Institute of Public Health Bengaluru since 2012. She was instrumental in setting up the Tribal Health Resource Centre and overseeing the hospital and community health program catering to the Soliga Adivasi people in Chamarajnagar district. At the Institute of Public Health Bengaluru, she joined two other team leads in establishing the Centre for Training, Research & Innovation in Tribal Health with the Indian Institute of Public Health Bengaluru and JSS Medical College under an award from the DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance. Through these collaborative efforts, she has helped establish a field site of learning for Adivasi health for medical students, public health and global health students from schools within India and abroad. These programs facilitate multiple research on the ground from the first Adivasi birth cohort to establishing a population-based haemoglobinopathy registry and designing and testing contextualised health interventions to tackle harmful substance use. During COVID-19 pandemic, her team collaborated with the Soliga Pusumale Kala Tanda led by Basavaraju Soliga, a senior Soliga leader, district administration and conducted an awareness campaign on COVID-19, health issues and the choice of vaccination across 72 tribal hamlets over 3 months, that received much local and state level appreciation.