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.
In 2015, he convened “Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest” (NAPi), the group works on food and nutrition policy issues to protect public interest. He has been working on issues related to Ultra-processed food products, especially its marketing and food labelling.
His strong belief in the legal frameworks to protect public health has made significant impact in India and neighboring countries. In 2001, the Dr. Gupta was named a Fellow of Indian Academy of Pediatrics.
From 2010 to 2015, he was a Member of the PM’s Council on India’s Nutrition Challenges. He was a member of the WHO’s global development group for guidelines on complementary feeding launched in October 2023.