A disease that once paralysed hundreds of thousands of children every year is now a memory in India — and on World Polio Day, 24 October, Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel used that hard-won victory as a springboard to call for renewed vigilance, urging every family to ensure their newborns and young children complete their full vaccination schedule.

Writing in Gujarati, CM Patel described building a polio-free world as 'સમસ્ત માનવજાતની સર્વોચ્ચ પ્રાથમિકતા' — 'the supreme priority of all humankind' — and framed World Polio Day as an occasion both to review the historic gains made against the disease and to renew a collective commitment to its complete global eradication. He credited India's victory over polio to three forces working in concert: mass public awareness, administrative determination, and wide-reaching vaccination campaigns.

India's Long Road to the 2014 WHO Certification

The story behind that victory is one of the most ambitious public-health mobilisations the world has ever seen. India launched the Pulse Polio Immunization Programme in 1995, rolling out nationwide supplementary vaccination rounds that reached even the most remote corners of the country. The last recorded wild poliovirus case occurred in 2011, and the World Health Organization certified India polio-free in 2014 — a moment that stunned global health experts who had long considered the country among the hardest to clear given its population density and healthcare access gaps.

That achievement did not happen in isolation. Since 1988, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched, global polio cases have been reduced by more than 99 percent. The strategy everywhere has been the same: repeated mass campaigns, strong routine immunization coverage, and relentless surveillance to catch reintroduction early.

Why 'Polio-Free' Is Not the Same as 'Polio-Safe'

CM Patel's message carries a warning tucked inside its celebration. Eradication is fragile. Regions that eliminate a disease can lose that status the moment vaccination coverage slips and the virus finds an unimmunized child. His call — that 'no child should be left out of routine immunization' — is precisely the kind of sustained administrative pressure that keeps cleared regions clear.

For Gujarat, and for India as a whole, the watch item is straightforward: routine immunization data for infants and any supplementary polio rounds that state health departments announce. Numbers matter. Coverage gaps, even small ones, are the cracks through which eliminated diseases return.

Twelve years of being polio-free is a milestone worth marking. Staying polio-free for the next twelve — and the twelve after that — is the harder, quieter work. CM Patel's message on World Polio Day 2026 is a reminder that the job is never truly finished until the last case on earth is gone.