This paper details the innovative and pioneering design and roll out of the largest school based deworming programme in the world at that time.
Reaching over 17 million school-aged children this government-led programme employed 160,000 education and health staff to conduct deworming in 67,000 schools in the State of Bihar.
The programme provided a model for using both strategic survey techniques and the expertise of the health and education sectors working together to enable the rapid and cost effective rollout of sustainable large scale school based deworming operations.
This paradigm shift in programmatic thinking laid the foundation for
scale up nationally in India and many other countries around the world.
