The origin of NCDC can be traced back to Central Malaria Bureau, which was established at Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, India in 1909. It was renamed as the Malaria Institute of India in 1938 and in 1963 renamed as the NICD. The reorganized Institute was established to develop a national centre for teaching and research in various disciplines of epidemiology and control of communicable diseases. The Institute was envisaged to act as a centre par excellence for providing multi disciplinary and integrated expertise in the control of communicable disease. The Institute was also entrusted the task of developing reliable rapid economic epidemiological tools which could be effectively applied in the field for the control of communicable diseases. The objectives of the Institute broadly cover three activities - training, service and operational research in the field of communicable diseases and their prevention and control in the country. The centre is under affiliation with Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi. The Centre for AIDS & Related Diseases was established at National Institute of Communicable Diseases as a National Reference Laboratory as per NACO guidelines in the year 2002. Prior to this it had existed as AIDS Reference Laboratory since 1985, one of the first reference centers in India, which started surveillance of HIV infection in the country. On 30 July 2009, it was named as National Centre for Disease Control.
Divisions
NCDC has fourteen technical centres/divisions under it namely
NCDC has a staff of 434 officers and officials. The budget allocation for the fiscal year 2017 was ₹233.04 crores.
Activities
Doctors from NCDC had been previously summoned to investigate potential outbreaks of diseases including suspected cases of Pneumonic plague in Punjab in 2002, SARS outbreaks in 2004, meningitis outbreak in Delhi in 2005, and avian influenza in 2006, and have reviewed preparedness for coronavirus in 2019–2020.
Global Disease Detection
The NCDC in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has set up the Global Disease Detection Regional Center in New Delhi, India. This will lead to long-term public health collaboration between the Government of India and the United States in many areas including establishing high quality research and surveillance on important human infectious diseases, establishing the Indian EIS program, and developing the NCDC as an international nodal agency in South Asia.
