Data Challenge: Mapping India’s AMR Crisis: A Statistical and One Health Approach to Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health crisis, and India is among its most critical hotspots due to factors like overprescription, poor sanitation, limited access to healthcare, and rampant antibiotic use in agriculture. While several national and international efforts have attempted to map India’s AMR burden, surveillance data remain fragmented, underutilized, and often disconnected from actionable public health and stewardship strategies.

Through this challenge, our project aims to utilise the power of the Vivli AMR datasets to enable a two-pronged, data-driven strategy. First, we will consolidate and analyze resistance trends in both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial infections across Indian states using the AMR Vivli Challenge datasets requested. By conducting factor analysis and stratifying the data by region, age, sex, and pathogen-antibiotic combinations, we hope to identify high-burden geographies and treatment gaps, informing treatment strategies and improving patient outcomes and clinical stewardship.

Second, we aim to extend the analysis beyond the clinical context to adopt a One Health approach—recognizing the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental reservoirs of AMR. We will correlate resistance trends observed in humans with publicly available data from poultry farms, wastewater sources, and pharmaceutical effluents in India. This holistic integration will uncover environmental resistomes and potential routes of horizontal gene transfer, informing public health practices and system-level interventions. This is extremely essential owing to the rampant rise in resistomes found in various parts of India, colistin administration to poultry and its consistent impact on humans being administered with these drugs.

We aim that these approaches not only provide actionable insights for localized interventions in India but also build a scalable, data-integrated framework that can serve as a model for LMICs battling AMR. Our ultimate goal is to drive tailored, evidence-based solutions to strengthen AMR surveillance, stewardship, and mitigation in India.