India, April 28 -- As we enter World Immunisation Week, it would be interesting to look at India's immunisation journey which began over two centuries ago when the country's first smallpox vaccine was administered in Mumbai in 1802, laying the foundation for public preventative health care.

More than a century later, preventative immunisation began in earnest in 1948 with the adoption of the International Tuberculosis Campaign, an initiative designed to stop the potentially deadly bacterial disease that mainly affects the lungs and killed an estimated 500,000 people a year in India in the late 1940s.

Yet it wasn't until 1978 that India reached a turning point in its vaccine delivery framework and ability to deliver broader protective he...