Dr Armida Fernandez Of India’s First Human Milk Bank Wins Padma Shri

Dr Armida Fernandez has been awarded the Padma Shri award in recognition of her decades long contribution to maternal infant and child health in India. A senior neonatologist and public health leader she is best known for pioneering India and Asia’s first human breastmilk bank and for her work to improve the survival of premature and sick newborns.

Through her clinical leadership academic work and community based initiatives she has played a key role in strengthening newborn care and expanding access to quality healthcare for women and children in vulnerable urban communities.

Early Life and Medical Training

Dr Armida Fernandez hails from Karnataka and trained as a medical doctor at a time when specialised newborn care was still evolving in India. She completed her MBBS in Hubli and later pursued her post graduation at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai. During her training she developed a strong interest in the care of premature and sick newborns and in the role of nutrition in reducing infant mortality.

She went on to build a long academic and clinical career at Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital also known as Sion Hospital in Mumbai. Over the years she served as Professor and Head of the Department of Neonatology and later as the Dean of the hospital.

Working in one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals she focused on strengthening systems that served large numbers of low income urban families. Her work combined clinical care teaching research and public health practice.

Pioneering Newborn Care and Human Milk Banking

A defining moment in Dr Fernandez’s career came in 1989 when she helped establish India’s first and Asia’s first Human Milk Bank at Sion Hospital. At the time the concept of feeding infants with donated human milk was unfamiliar and often resisted. Despite this she worked to put in place safe and ethical systems for the collection storage and use of donor milk.

The milk bank played a major role in improving survival among premature and low birth weight newborns whose mothers were unable to breastfeed.

Dr Fernandez’s research showed that breast milk significantly reduced illness and death among these babies even when they were admitted to neonatal intensive care units. She also encouraged the involvement of mothers in the care of their hospitalised newborns a practice that later became widely accepted and shown to be protective.

Alongside milk banking she worked on practical and low cost innovations to improve newborn care. Her academic contributions supported the development of neonatology as a recognised discipline in India including some of the country’s early doctoral programmes in the field. She delivered lectures on breastfeeding and milk banking across India and abroad and became a key voice in promoting evidence based newborn nutrition.

With support from UNICEF she helped prepare a Breastfeeding Manual a Blue Module and educational videos that were used to train doctors nurses and hospital staff in Maharashtra and other states.

She also supported the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative and helped set up maternity homes in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra with the support of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai and the state government. She later played an important role in launching the MIYCN Mother Infant and Young Child Nutrition Programme.

Community Health Work and Public Service

In 1999 Dr Fernandez extended her work beyond hospitals by founding SNEHA Society for Nutrition Education and Health Action. Based in Mumbai SNEHA was created to address maternal and child health nutrition women’s empowerment adolescent health and the prevention of violence against women and children in urban informal settlements. At a time when public health efforts were largely rural focused SNEHA brought sustained attention to the needs of vulnerable urban communities.

Today, SNEHA works in slums and chawls across Mumbai and other districts of Maharashtra as well as parts of Gujarat and Jharkhand. The organisation has around 400 full time staff and hundreds of volunteers and has reached close to one million people through its programmes. Its work spans maternal and newborn care child nutrition adolescent health gender based violence prevention and palliative care.

Dr Fernandez has also served as President of the National Neonatology Forum and worked as Medical Director at Holy Family Hospital in Bandra Mumbai. In later years she founded the Romila Palliative Care Centre which provides free care to patients with life limiting illnesses and Connect and Care of Homebound Senior Citizens which supports elderly people living alone.

Her earlier honours include being named an Ashoka Fellow in 2004 the Dr B N Puranik Outstanding Service Award in 2010 and the QIM Platinum Standard in Healthcare in 2013. The Padma Shri awarded to her in 2026 recognises her lifelong commitment to building strong public health systems and improving access to quality healthcare for women and children in India’s most vulnerable urban communities.