How do you fight a health condition that hides behind everyday life? Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) affects nearly one in three Indian adults — yet most will never receive a diagnosis until it’s too late. By the time symptoms appear, the condition has often already progressed to cirrhosis or cancer. It remains one of the country’s most widespread yet least recognized health threats, with limited awareness and almost no routine screening in place. Dr. Kanica Kaushal is working to change that.
As an Associate Professor at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) in New Delhi, Dr. Kanica spearheads multiple national-level initiatives focused on prevention, early identification and intervention for fatty liver. When national guidelines released in 2021 saw limited uptake, she joined efforts to support their adoption — working across multiple states/UTs (nine to date), to build partnerships with health departments, training master trainers and frontline workers to translate policy into action. In Madhya Pradesh, for instance, following ILBS’s capacity-building efforts, the state launched one of the largest screening drives for fatty liver reaching more than 15 million people.
The WomenLift Health Leadership Journey gave Dr. Kaushal more than leadership skills — it gave her reach. A relationship built through the programme led to a ₹12.7 million funding partnership that will carry capacity-building efforts into ten additional states, putting early detection and reversal of NAFLD on the map for millions more Indians. With this backing, she is now leading the development of a learning management system to transform how medical officers and frontline workers are trained, tracked, and equipped — enabling them to identify NAFLD at a stage where it can still be reversed, long before it advances to irreversible damage.