Ali Mehdi was a Senior Visiting Fellow (2014-2022) at ICRIER. He established the ICRIER Health Policy Initiative (HPI) – www.icrier-health.org – in 2014 and led it since.
Ali has 15 years of research experience on a range of health issues (chronic diseases, antimicrobial resistance, social determinants of health, health inequities, health surveys and surveillance, health care financing, governance, manpower, drug and food regulation, universal health care, preventive health, traditional and complementary systems of medicine, etc.) as well as related demographic issues (mortality, life expectancy, fertility and migration). Ali also worked on job-related issues as part of The World Bank headquarter-funded Network on Jobs and Development (NJD), which he established and led at ICRIER during 2013-15 along with The World Bank and partner institutions.
As part of his health experience, he has also been part of G20’s T20 Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) during the German Presidency in 2017 and conducted research for the Ministry of Finance to help develop Government of India’s position on health issues for the G20.
As part of his research experience at ICRIER, Ali has conducted more than a thousand stakeholder interactions with international / national / state policymakers, organizations, academia and industry in close to a dozen Indian states as well as a dozen countries in North America, Europe and Asia.
Ali has published books, reports, book chapters, journal and working papers, columns and blogs as well as spoken at several national and international workshops, seminars and conferences. His recent books include ‘Health of the Nation – Perspectives for a New India’ (Oxford University Press 2020), ‘A shot of justice – Priority-setting for addressing child mortality’ (Oxford University Press 2019), ‘Freedoms, fragility and job creation – Perspectives from Jammu and Kashmir’ (Springer 2018).
Ali did his MA in Social Sciences – with 2 semesters at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and 1 each at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (South Africa) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) as well as an internship at the Population Division of United Nations ESCAP (Thailand) – and his PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), with a four-year full scholarship under the Excellence Initiative of the Federal government of Germany.