About Chapal
Chapal Mehra is a public health specialist and social impact expert with a background in policy, advocacy, and program innovation and development. His work focuses primarily on infectious diseases and mental health, gender, health innovations and human rights.
As a health expert and advocate, he has worked on diseases including Tuberculosis, HIV and COVID-19. This work has focussed on community led and developed approaches to disease control and equitable care. His work on mental health has a special focus on marginalised groups such as urban migrants, women, children and queer populations. His work in policy has included a focus on access to new diagnostics, drugs, patient literacy, patient rights, health provider education, and helping address the intersections of gender mental health and diseases.
He was one of the founders of The Humrahi Trust, along with Saleem Kidwai and Aditya Bandyopadhyay (one of India’s earliest queer community collectives) and worked on community organizing, advocacy and support to queer folks. More recently, he founded The Rahaat Project, a mental health project for queer youth in universities. Rahaat works with the LGBTQIA++ youth communities in universities with the aim to reduce self-stigma and improve the mental health awareness and self-care capability of LGBTQIA++ youth.
As a writer his focus has been in the areas of public health, human development queer rights, history, and person led narratives. His work covers queer history and culture as well as concerns such as oppression, systemic disparities, and lack of access to healthcare for marginalised groups. He has contributed to leading publications, including The Times of India, The Indian Express, The Hindu, Scroll.in, The Quint, and The Wire, The Huffington Post, The BBC, and The New York Times.
His academic work has focussed on infectious diseases as also ideas of quality of care, community engagement and participation and includes publications in the The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and along with book chapters.