Dr. Arun Gupta MD FIAP

He is a pediatrician of 1976 batch, was in private practice in Jalandhar, Punjab for 11 years, and gave it up in 1990s to promote and protect breastfeeding. He founded the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) in 1991.Over nearly 32 years, BPNI has played key role in strengthening national policies to promote, protect and support breastfeeding, which has led to significant fall in use of breastmilk substitutes from 1980s. He writes extensively on food and nutrition policy and he has special interest in conflicts of interest. Dr. Gupta conceptualized and created IBFAN’s World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative (WBTi), a break-through tool to identify gaps in policy and programmes on breastfeeding by bringing together key government, academic, and NGOs. It created a unique web repository of policy and programmes. It is now rooted in 99 countries. His recent work included conceptualizing and developing the ‘Breastfeeding Friendly Hospital Accreditation and “IDecide- About Feeding My Baby”  to educate pregnant women to make a decision on feeding babies.