Disease surveillance is the core activity of the health department in Gujarat to which it is fully committed.  There was/is an urgent need to streamline and integrate disease data flow and ensure utilization of data for decision making as a routine.

Under the World Health Organization (WHO) Earthquake relief mission in 2001, an Integrated Disease Surveillance (IDS) Programme was implemented in the earthquake-affected blocks of the Kutch district following the earthquake. This was a successful programme for early detection and prevention of communicable disease outbreaks, which cause further morbidity and mortality adding to the after effects of any natural disaster.

Learning from the success of the Kutch programme, the government of Gujarat launched a pioneering pilot IDS programme with the technical inputs of WHO in 8 other earthquake-affected districts (Ahmedabad, Mehsana, Surendranagar, Patan, Banaskantha, Jamnagar, Kutch, and Rajkot) including 3 medical college hospitals, and municipal corporations. Selected large private/trust hospitals of Gujarat are also a part of the reporting network. Financial support for the project has been from the European Union.