Ruchit Nagar

Nagar studied at Yale University as an undergraduate and took a Master of Public Health in the epidemiology of microbial disease at the Yale School of Public Health, graduating in 2016. He subsequently qualified in medicine and completed a combined residency in internal medicine and paediatrics at Yale in 2025, going on to a fellowship in paediatric critical care.

While at Yale he worked with the Human Nature Lab, mapping social networks in rural Udaipur district in Rajasthan to study how network dynamics affect adherence to childhood immunisation.

Khushi Baby began in 2014 in a Yale course on appropriate technology for the developing world, taught around a challenge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on closing the global immunisation gap. Nagar and his classmates proposed a wearable pendant carrying a near-field communication chip that would hold an infant's vaccination record, so that a health worker in the field could read and update it without a paper card or network connection. The name means 'happy baby'.

The organisation ran two randomised controlled trials of the approach in Rajasthan; the second, involving about 3,200 mothers, found a 12 per cent improvement in infant immunisation. In 2019 Khushi Baby approached the Government of Rajasthan about taking the system to scale.

The result was the Community Health Integrated Platform, a state-wide digital health record used by community health workers. Khushi Baby reports that the platform is used by more than 70,000 health workers across some 48,000 villages and holds records for more than 45 million people. Government investment in scaling the platform has exceeded 20 million US dollars, alongside philanthropic support of more than 8 million dollars.

Nagar has been chief executive as the organisation grew to a team of about 75 people.

In 2014 the Khushi Baby team won the inaugural Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health at the Yale School of Public Health, worth 25,000 US dollars. Nagar has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in health care and recognised as a Young Innovator by the World Innovation Summit for Health.[2][3][4][5]