Health literacy is defined as the ability to find, comprehend, evaluate, and apply health information to sustain good health. Health literacy is a continuous, lifelong process rather than a short-term intervention, requiring sustained learning and reinforcement as individuals encounter changing health needs and circumstances.
These health behaviours and habits need to be developed in a systematic manner. Building health literacy at a young age can help people make educated decisions, form healthy habits, and pass that information on to their family and community.
In the short term, sleep, nutrition and stress regulation strengthen attention, memory and academic performance. A child who understands the importance of adequate sleep, for instance, is better equipped to recognise why persistent tiredness affects concentration. In the long term, they underpin happiness, resilience and the capacity to achieve one’s dreams. Health literacy makes this link explicit, so wellbeing is understood as an enabler of learning rather than a peripheral concern.
Health literacy teaches students how to develop healthy habits. Healthy habits in physical activity, nutrition, emotional regulation and peer relationships are best developed through a spiral curriculum, with repeated, age-appropriate exposure across grade bands. Habits formed through experiential learning during school years tend to persist into adulthood. The aim is gradual development of habits that can endure beyond school.
Functional health literacy teaches students where to go and when to access health services. These health services include primary health centres, mental support centres, medical helplines and referral pathways.
Health literacy teaches students how to distinguish evidence-based information from viral fads, miracle diets and aggressive marketing. Learners meet health claims on social media long before they meet a clinician. Evaluating those claims is a higher-order skill, sitting at the “analyse” and “evaluate” levels of Bloom’s taxonomy – a hierarchical framework used to classify learning.
Preventing future costs
Prevention-oriented health literacy is a cost-effective public investment. Early awareness of nutrition, physical activity, hygiene and immunisation lowers the long-term risk of non-communicable diseases and avoidable infections. This eases out-of-pocket expenditure for households.
Taking the learning home
Through reverse socialisation, schoolchildren become active educators of parents, grandparents and siblings. A student who learns to read food labels may bring those questions to the family grocery shop. Take-home activities, peer-led sessions and project-based assignments carry classroom learning into the household, extending the reach of a single lesson across generations, especially where adult health literacy is low.
Crowded timetables, exam-centric assessment and limited teacher capacity-building had constrained delivery of health literacy in the past. The policy architecture has now evolved with NEP 2020 prioritising holistic development and life skills. NCERT has developed a new subject titled Physical Education and Well-being. The Ayushman Bharat School Health Program has also trained teachers as Health Ambassadors.
When health literacy is taught early, practised often, and assessed meaningfully, the promise of developing healthy behaviours and habits stops being a slogan and becomes a lived standard: learners who are healthier and ready to lift their families and communities with them.
The author is executive chairman of Tarang Health Alliance and India’s national representative to the UNESCO Chair for Global Health & Education.
