Sanjeev Sanyal Reveals USAID's Role in Running India's National Family Health Survey Since the 1990s

Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), said on Monday that those concerned about USAID's role in Indian elections should also be as concerned about the organization's presence in India's healthcare system and social policies.

In a post on X social media platform, Sanyal said that USAID “effectively ran India's National Family Health Survey (NFHS) from the 1990s till it was stopped two years ago”.

“This is the most important medical dataset in India and drives a lot of health policy. Not only were we allowing a foreign agency to harvest our medical data but, by allowing them to design surveys and direct analysis, we were letting them influence our national health responses,” he emphasised.

Equally troubling, the celebrated economist averred, was the discovery that a significant portion of the NFHS questionnaire had been deliberately constructed to further vested social narratives.

“The questionnaire for men, for instance, is only 29 pages but that for women is 94 pages. A lot of the additional questions are deliberately worded to elicit a narrative of intra-family violence against Indian women. Must say, very slyly done,” he further stated.

Sanyal pointed out that he and late Bibek Debroy had opposed it vigorously, so much so that they even spoke about it in columns in the press.

“Fortunately, GoI took up the matter and the latest NFHS is being done by the Health Ministry on its own,” he maintained.

A release by the United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a government agency led by billionaire Elon Musk, recently canceled a number of global funding projects. Among them was the $21 million that had been set aside to increase voter turnout in India.

“Would love to find out who received the $21mn spent to improve ‘voter turnout in India’ and the $29mn to ‘strengthening political landscape in Bangladesh’; not to mention the $29mn spend to improve ‘fiscal federalism’ in Nepal. USAID is the biggest scam in human history,” Sanyal had earlier posted on X.