Dr Arun Gupta is a pediatrician of 40 years experience, turned public health activist. He is the central  coordinator of the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI), which hosts the Asian regional office of the  International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN). IBFAN is a 1998 Right Livelihood Award recipient. He gave up a lucrative private practice in the 1990s to work towards putting child nutrition on the forefront of social change, and founded the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI). Now a leading organisation in India, it challenges corporate interference in policy matters.

His key interests are child health and nutrition policy analysis with special interest on breastfeeding and infant feeding. He keenly follows up on areas of conflict of interests and is the founder convenor of Alliance Against Conflict of Interest (AACI).  Of late he also convened ‘Nutrition Advocacy in Public interest‘ in 2016. NAPi is a national think tank on nutrition –consisting of independent experts in epidemiology, human nutrition, community nutrition and paediatrics  medical education, administration and management; having decades of experience in respective fields; has come together to advocate on nutrition policy in public interest.

He was a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for India’s Nutrition Challenges from 2010 to 2017.

He writes extensively on the politics of corporate involvement in the nutrition in leading dailies as editorials and publishes in international magazines, and technical journals. 

He is the creator of IBFAN’s World Breastfeeding Trends Initiative (WBTi), a breakthrough tool to measure policy inputs on breastfeeding and infant and young child feeding at national levels and generating action to document gaps and call for action to invest in this area. WBTi is now active in more than 100 countries, 97 have reported on it. He has also led the work to develop World Breastfeeding Costing Initiative( WBCi) that includes a a financial planning tool to cost and plan interventions.  The World Breastfeeding Costing Initiative (WBCi) tools help to cost single or multi-year plan and track it.