iAlive - Healthy I, Healthy India

iAlive volunteers conduct seminars at various locations to educate youngsters about lifestyle diseases. Help us organize seminars at your college/university/workplace. You can become an iAlive volunteer and conduct the seminar yourself! Get in touch with us to know how.

Mission: To start a health revolution in India.

Why?

Indians are very susceptible to lifestyle diseases. World Health Organization estimates that the risk of coronary artery disease for Indians is three to four times higher than that for Americans, six times higher than that for the Chinese and 20 times higher than that for the Japanese.
Indians succumb to diabetes and heart attacks 5-10 years earlier than their western counterparts
India has the largest number of cardiac patients in the world
Heart-related diseases are slated to become the number one killer in India by 2015
India is the "diabetes capital" of the world (International Journal of Diabetes)
India will incur an accumulated loss of $236.6 billion by 2015 on account of unhealthy lifestyles and faulty diet. The annual income loss to Indians because of these diseases, which was $8.7 billion in 2005, is projected to rise to $54 billion in 2015. (Source: Joint report by World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum)
It has become very common to have someone in the neighborhood who is suffering from some form of lifestyle-related disease.

What is going wrong currently?
Right now, the focus is rightly on building expensive world-class healthcare facilities for "patients". But we have not tried to earnestly uproot the actual cause. The root cause of heart diseases is the lifestyle, especially eating habits, of people. The health problems which occur at a later stage in life are the culmination of how an individual has been living since his birth. Most people in India eat unhealthy food daily and are intolerant to change in their lifestyles. The future of the country is in peril. We want to become a superpower by 2050 with healthy citizens, not a country filled with patients.

What is our broad plan?
Educate the uninitiated people about health. Education involves knowledge about healthy lifestyle using our Health Manual and Education Program. iAlive is a people's movement. We reach out to the junta of this nation and assist them in improving health of their society.

What are our specific action steps?
We follow a "AWAKEN-EDUCATE-MOTIVATE" principle.

Attract volunteers through our website and our numerous health education seminars.
Provide volunteers with a Health Manual, comprising of a set of health commandments to improve the daily well-being of an individual.
Motivate health-educated volunteers to spread the health-education fire by educating people in their neighborhood, be it their family, neighbors, work-mates or fellow travellers.

As the Honorable Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, Former President of India, quotes,