When I first visited India in 2005, the country still had 66 cases of polio. But when I flew to India this past January, I landed in a country that had been polio-free for nearly six years. India achieved its polio elimination milestone in 2014, along with the rest of the World Health Organization’s South-East Asia Region.
In fact, the whole reason I was flying to India was to observe India’s National Immunization Days, an initiative begun in 1995 by the Indian government with Rotary International and its Global Polio Eradication Initiative partners.