For Arogya World founder Nalini Saligram, the greatest health victory is often invisible: preventing chronic disease before treatment becomes necessary.
Nalini Saligram has spent the better part of two decades asking a deceptively simple question: What if we could prevent diabetes and other diseases instead of spending so much time and money trying to cure them?
There is something inherently difficult about devot- ing a life to disease prevention: Its successes can be hard to see. Treatment is tangible. It comes with a diagnosis, a prescription, a procedure, and measurable interventions. Prevention is quieter. Its triumph is often invisible — the illness that never arrives, the complication that never develops, the prescription that is never needed.
The Arogya World team with Healthy Workplace- certified companies at the 2025 Global Summit & Healthy Workplace Awards in Mumbai.
For Saligram, that invisible victory has become her life’s work. She is the founder of Arogya World, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, built on a premise simple enough to fit on a refrigerator magnet: eat right, move more, avoid tobacco.
That work has earned her recognition as an Ashoka Fellow and a three-time Clinton Global Initiative Commitment Maker. But as she tells it, the mission didn’t start with an award. It started somewhere far more personal.
From the lab to the boardroom
Saligram’s story begins in Bengaluru, in a middle-class family that placed a premium on education. She excelled in science, earned a doctorate in biochemistry from the Indian Institute of Science, and built a corporate career spanning four countries: India, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. She worked at companies like Merck, Glaxo Wellcome, Hill & Knowlton, and Merial. Along the way, she learned to build partnerships, persuade decision-makers, and translate complicated science into language people could act on.
At 52, Saligram was working at Merck but felt underutilized despite years of accomplishments. This made her restless. When she found out that she had diabetes, it struck a nerve. “Diabetes runs in my father’s family, and I had seen firsthand how many family members had suffered from diabetes.” She has spoken about the moment at greater length in a TEDx talk on making Pune diabetes-free.
The Arogya World team with Healthy Workplace- certified companies at the 2025 Global Summit & Healthy Workplace Awards in Mumbai.
She says a friend noticed some- thing about her: whenever the conversation turned to starting a nonprofit focused on diabetes prevention, “my eyes lit up.” Her husband, Ravi, encouraged her to pursue it. In 2010, she took the leap.
“I feel I made the best decision of my life doing that,” she says. Her family history of diabetes, along with her scientific training and years in global communications, helped convince her that she was well positioned to do something about the disease rather than simply watch it spread.
Taking health beyond the doctor’s office
Saligram points out that doctors have limited time with patients — just enough to address an immediate medical problem. But lifestyle change, which is the real answer to disease prevention, requires something different and far more than a doctor’s visit. It requires sustained reinforcement of new habits in settings where they can be incorporated into daily life.
Determined to spread such a healthy lifestyle to the masses, she started Arogya World with a mission to bring prevention to places where people already spend their days: schools, workplaces, and communities. Saligram calls it the “doorstep health model,” offering programs grounded in behavioral science and built with partners capable of delivering them at scale.
The organization has reached millions of people in India through initiatives focused on healthier eating, physical activity, and other preventive habits.
But Saligram is careful to distinguish activity from impact. “We don’t measure success by how many programs we do,” she says. The real question is what changed: Did someone become more active? Quit smoking? Did a school build an environment that supports healthier choices? For Saligram, numbers matter because they tell a story about human behavior. And behavior, she has learned, is where the real work begins.
Making healthy choices make sense
Tell an 11-year-old that an apple is healthier than a bag of chips, and you’ll likely get a nod and nothing more. Turn the idea into a game, and it sticks. In one Arogya World school activity, an apple becomes a ladder, and a bag of chips becomes a snake in a game of Snakes and Ladders. In another, children race with backpacks full of books, then race again without them. The lesson about excess weight is no longer theoretical.
An effective public-health message cannot simply be scientifically correct. It has to be emotionally and practically relevant to the person receiving it. What shapes Arogya World’s digital work is the same instinct to meet people where they are. Its messaging programs now reach rural Indians directly via WhatsApp, using a deliberately conversational tone and doctor-led videos to lend credibility.
Digital messaging is made even more effective by adjusting the pitch to the audience: for a young person, it might be about becoming a health champion within the family; for someone in midlife, the conversation turns to longevity. Saligram understands that stories are often what move people from knowing to doing. The diabetes program alone has reached more than 2 million people across India with text-based, science-backed messages about prevention.
Prevention can be enormously effective, but success can be hard to see. When treatment works, everyone sees the result. Prevention asks people to sacrifice something today for a future they can’t yet see, and a 30-year-old who feels fine has little natural incentive to think about a diagnosis 20 years away. “Youngsters everywhere in the world think they are invincible.” It’s a mindset she says is especially risky in a country where diabetes often develops earlier than in the West.
Her answer isn’t fear; it’s relevance. Tell someone exactly what healthier eating looks like — for example, how much rice or how many chapatis to put on the plate. Point out that exercise doesn’t require a gym: walking to the market, doing household chores, and taking an evening stroll with friends all count. Campaigns such as #HealthyWaliDiwali translate that into the rhythms of daily life and festivals. Prevention, she argues, isn’t just virtuous; it’s cost-effective — and in diabetes, she calls it “the holy grail.”
Atlanta, an unexpected hub
Atlanta entered Saligram’s story when she joined Merial as head of global corporate communications. It was a role that marked one of the longest tenures of her career and in which her corporate experience began to evolve into something more expansive. When she founded Arogya World, Atlanta became a hub alongside Bengaluru — a base for partnerships, fundraising, and a global board.
Her relationship with Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health has become especially significant. She serves on the Dean’s Council and works closely with the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center, where researchers help review and develop health content while Saligram helps build platforms to bring prevention research to wider audiences. She and Ravi have also endowed a scholarship at Rollins for graduate students conducting research on diabetes prevention in India.
“Nalini Saligram is a passionate and relentless advocate for lifestyle changes to prevent diabetes and chronic diseases,” says Dr. Venkat Narayan, executive director of the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center. “Arogya World’s work has already touched over five million people in India. Nalini is tireless and is committed to advancing science-based diabetes prevention into action and policy. I have watched her for nearly two decades, and am in awe of her energy and enthusiasm to effect positive change in the lives of people.”
Bringing the lessons home
Arogya World began with India as its focus, but Saligram increasingly sees Indian Americans as part of the same conversation. South Asians in the U.S. face an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, yet generic health advice often collides with food, family, and social habits that don’t bend easily. MyDesiPlate is her answer. It does not ask people to abandon the food they love, but to make it healthier. Arogya World’s Healthy Schools program, built for India, has been adapted for Atlanta, and its Arogya Clubs now train young people, including students from African American and Hispanic communities, to teach their peers about healthy eating and movement.
As a board member of TiE Atlanta, Saligram brings a nonprofit sensibility to a community better known for technology and business entrepreneurship. “Many of the characteristics are the same in those who found for-profit startups and those who start nonprofits. We think of ourselves as in the impact-making business. And it’s great to learn from business leaders in our region and imbibe the energy of startups.”
She’s also part of Indiaspora’s Founders Circle. Its founder, M.R. Rangaswami, praises her “unwavering commitment” to tackling noncommunicable diseases, particularly diabetes, adding that he’s continually struck by the “passion, dedication, and energy” she brings to the mission.
Trust, and the workplace
The Arogya City model promotes voluntary commitments from organizations working collectively toward healthier communities, reflecting her belief that prevention is shared work, with roles for governments, businesses, schools, nonprofits, and individuals alike. “You have to tailor your programs to meet their needs,” she says, “but what keeps the partnerships going is trust.”
That extends to the workplace, where Arogya World argues that health isn’t just a benefit but a public health lever — companies have access to millions of adults during daytime hours, when they’re most reachable. Before the pandemic, their healthy-workplace framework focused mainly on physical health. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, employers began asking about mental health, too, and Saligram brought in experts from Harvard to expand the model accordingly.
The small print, and the small habits
Ask Saligram what keeps her going and the answer isn’t recognition — it’s a running tally. She and her team regularly ask themselves how many people they’ve reached, what actually changed, and whether they can tell that story more meaningfully.
There are setbacks. Grants fall through. Awards go to someone else. Partnerships stall. None of it, she says, defines the work. “I love to think: What have we done in the last six months?” It’s the same instinct that shaped her as a scientist — measure, learn, adjust, try again — now applied to a mission instead of an experiment.
Her advice to young people considering public health is unsentimental: passion isn’t optional. There’s a lot of tedious work behind every campaign, and without a real investment in the cause, she says, another field will likely bring more joy.
Even her own indulgences follow the doctrine. She loves aloo tikkis from Delhi and allows herself exactly one, once or twice a year. “Keep the quantities in check,” she says, “when you indulge in the special foods that add a zing to your life.”
What’s next
Technology is the newest layer. Arogya World is exploring how artificial intelligence can help answer questions from rural WhatsApp users, including through work with the Indian Council of Medical Research, and was recently selected as one of 10 organi- zations worldwide for Turn.io’s 2026 Chat for Health Accelerator. Saligram treats the technology as a delivery mechanism, not the point — the objective remains behavior change. She believes prevention’s strongest argument going forward is economic: modest interventions that avert enormous future health care costs, if their value can be demonstrated and scaled.
When asked what single habit she’d want every policymaker, CEO, and citizen to adopt today, her answer is characteristically uncomplicated: “Eat right.”
It’s a modest prescription for a life spent working to spread prevention on a global scale, requiring no breakthrough drug, expensive machine, or revolutionary technology. Just a meal, a walk, and a decision repeated often enough to become a habit.
Author of Kismetwali & Other Stories, Reetika Khanna is a freelance writer who likes to spotlight people with purpose. She has worked with ELLE as a senior features writer and as an associate features editor with ELLE DÉCOR, Mumbai. For more, go to ReetikaKhanna.com