Role at a glance
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Title
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State Program Manager, Karnataka
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Program
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Samasta digital health platform and other associated interventions with the DoHFW, Government of Karnataka
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Reports to
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Country Lead- Implementation/Health System Strengthening
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Leads
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Implementation team (district coordinators), community engagement team, field monitoring team
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Employment type
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Full-time (Annually renewable with initial 3 months’ probation)
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About Khushi Baby and Samasta
At Khushi Baby, we work to strengthen public health systems and improve access to timely, quality care for underserved and vulnerable communities. We partner with governments in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, bringing together digital health technology, data analytics, and community engagement to support frontline health workers and public health officials.
Our Community Health Integrated Platform (CHIP) supports over 85,000 community health workers, with longitudinal health records for more than 60 million people. It enables health workers to track care across health programs and equips public health officials with data to guide planning and service delivery.
Our Health Action Center (HAC) project embeds multidisciplinary teams within district health departments to translate health data into coordinated action. These teams identify high-risk individuals, coordinate outreach and referrals, and follow up with families and healthcare providers to address gaps in care.
Our work spans maternal and child health, nutrition, immunisation, family planning, tuberculosis, and climate and health. Through a multidisciplinary team specialising in technology, data science, implementation, policy, and programs, we work alongside government partners to build sustainable solutions that improve healthcare delivery at the last mile. We are always looking for motivated individuals to join us in strengthening public health systems and improving the lives of underserved communities.
About Samasta and GoK platforms/programs
Samasta is the Government of Karnataka's single digital platform for frontline health workers. Khushi Baby builds and implements it with the Department of Health and Family Welfare. It replaces paper registers with one app where ASHAs, PHCOs and CHOs record data once, at the source. The platform is open source and ABDM-compliant, and the Government of Karnataka owns the data. Samasta consists of and Samasta App, a Dashboard (Bimba) enabling the service providers/frontline HWs to conduct surveys, track the health and service status beneficiaries on various health modules and life stages and the Officials to make decisions at their level based on the information captured by the HWs through the app. Samasta is an interoperable and integratable platform to integrate with other National Portals which is on the progress.
Where it stands (October 2026): Nearly 78% of the Frontline HWs have been onboarded, and trained through a cascade model for Samasta App. The Digital Health Survey is running in all 31 districts and has enrolled about 1.74 million households (22%), covering more than 7 million people. Udupi district has reached full coverage. Samasta is featured in the state's 2026–27 budget.
What comes next, and where this role comes in: the state launch; covering the full population of about 40 million; completing the national and state integrations; paying ASHA incentives through ASHA Nidhi; regular data quality audits; closing the data-to-action loop through Bimba (The Dashboard); and AI decision support. The State Program Manager will drive this next phase with the government.
The Karnataka team already includes product, engineering, technology, policy and advocacy, and implementation staff, with district coordinators who lead training and rollout on the ground.
Sole purpose
The State Program Manager owns the rollout of Samasta in Karnataka from start to finish. The goal is for the platform to be adopted and used well by health workers and officials across the state, on time and at good quality.
The role is Khushi Baby's main link with the state government. It turns field realities into changes to the product and the program, and leads the implementation, community engagement and field monitoring teams who make adoption happen.
Key responsibilities
1. Statewide implementation and rollout
- Own the end-to-end implementation and rollout of Samasta across Karnataka, from readiness to adoption at scale.
- Lead the implementation vertical: set priorities, track progress against milestones, and support the team with strategic planning.
- Build a phased rollout plan with clear timelines and quality standards, agreed with the state government and Khushi Baby leadership.
- Anticipate delays and implementation risks. Build backup plans and mitigation steps for unforeseen situations, and escalate early when timelines are at risk.
- Check readiness before each rollout phase, including logistics, connectivity, user lists, logins and government orders.
- Set up standard operating procedures (SOPs) for rollout, training, support and escalation, and keep them current.
2. Government liaison and advocacy
- Act as Khushi Baby's main point of contact with the Department of Health and state officials for Samasta.
- Maintain strong working relationships with state and district officials, and report rollout status to them regularly.
- Bring field requirements to the state and to Khushi Baby, so the platform and program are adapted to ground realities
- Advocate for Khushi Baby's solutions to be integrated into government programs where relevant
- Secure the government orders, circulars and review mechanisms needed to drive usage at district and block level.
- Build state ownership of the platform, for example through state master trainers and government-led reviews, so it is sustainable over time.
3. Training and capacity building of users
- Plan and oversee training and capacity building for all platform users
- Design and introduce a scalable, high-quality training model, such as cascade training through master trainers, digital learning content and refresher sessions, to reach users statewide.
- Track training coverage and quality, and follow up where users are not adopting the platform.
4. Product feedback loop
- Set up a structured way to capture field issues, bugs and feature requests, and pass them to the product team with clear priorities.
- Take part in user acceptance testing (UAT) before new modules or releases go live in the field.
- Make sure product changes are explained to the field team and then to the users before they roll out.
5. Community engagement and user support
- Lead the in-house community engagement team (call centre) to help users adopt the system and troubleshoot problems
- Make sure user issues are logged, resolved and tracked within agreed turnaround times
- Review community engagement and field implementation on a regular cycle, to understand challenges, capture learning and improve the system.
6. Data quality, monitoring and learning
- Oversee all data collection under Khushi Baby's implementations in the state, and put in place a strong system of checks so data is timely and accurate.
- Ensure data quality at the point of collection, through field checks, validation and feedback to users.
- Support monitoring and evaluation (M&E) by linking field realities with data insights, and use dashboards to guide decisions.
- Collect and document case studies and success stories from the field.
- Make sure field practices protect personal and health data, in line with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and Khushi Baby's data policies.
- Set up cross-state learning: learn from Khushi Baby's work in other states and share Karnataka's experience with other state teams.
7. Team leadership
- Provide supportive supervision to district coordinators and the field monitoring and community engagement teams.
- Build the team's skills through coaching and regular feedback.
- Support the team in difficult situations, resolve conflicts, and uphold team integrity and Khushi Baby's values.
- Take part in hiring, onboarding and performance reviews for the state team implementation/CE team.
8. Reporting, partnerships and stakeholder engagement
- Give the fundraising and grant management team timely updates on field implementation and rollout status, with headline numbers for donor reports.
- Host and support visits from donors, partners and other stakeholders, and help them understand Khushi Baby's work in the field.
- Support related initiatives and stakeholder engagement in the state as needed, to help Khushi Baby grow and support ongoing work.
- Support the finance and grant management team in using the state implementation budget well. Share timely updates on implementation progress and upcoming activities, such as training, travel and field work.
- Suggest ways to make implementation more cost-efficient. Set up internal controls within the state team so that everyone follows Khushi Baby’s finance and admin policies, and help team members understand the relevant policies, rules and regulations.
- Review and approve the field team’s monthly expense claims.
Key collaborations
The State Program Lead works closely with Khushi Baby's leadership and other teams. The aim is shared ownership and alignment with Khushi Baby's goals and vision.
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Who
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Working together on
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State Operations Lead
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Overall state plan, priorities, resources and escalations
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Chief Operating Officer (COO)/
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Operational planning, budgets and cross-state alignment, Partnership, Organization-wide priorities, reviews and leadership reporting,
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Policy and advocacy team/Country Lead Implementation/Health System Strengthening
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Government engagement, orders and program integration Operational planning, budgets and cross-state alignment, Partnership, Organization-wide priorities, reviews and leadership reporting,
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Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and tech team
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Platform stability, technical issues and infrastructure readiness
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Product Lead and product team
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Field feedback, feature priorities, UAT and release planning
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M&E Lead and CDS
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Indicators, dashboards, data quality and evaluations Learnings.
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Chief of Staff (COS)
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Budget planning, Resource allocation and Internal control, Team Building.
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Fundraising and grant management team
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Donor reporting, proposals and stakeholder visits, program scaling and budget allocation
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Other state teams
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Cross-state learning and sharing what works
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Success measures
Performance is reviewed against these measures. Targets are set each year with the reporting manager.
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Area
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Measure
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Rollout
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Modules and districts live against the agreed rollout plan and timelines
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Adoption
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Share of trained users actively using the platform each month
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Training
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Share of target users trained, and post-training assessment scores
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User support
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Share of user issues resolved within the agreed turnaround time
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Data quality
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Timeliness and completeness of data, and error rates found in field checks
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Government engagement
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Regular state reviews held, and government orders issued to support rollout
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Reporting
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Rollout updates and donor inputs delivered on time
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Team
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Team retention, capability growth and supervision visits completed
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Qualifications and experience
Essential
- Master's degree in public health, social work, development studies, management or a related field.
- 8 to 10 years of experience in public health programs, including at least 4 years leading large-scale implementation with state or district governments.
- Proven experience rolling out a digital health or technology program at district or state scale.
- Experience managing distributed field teams of 15 or more people.
- Fluency in Kannada and English, spoken and written.
- Willingness to travel extensively within Karnataka.
Desirable
- Experience with National Health Mission (NHM) programs, especially reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH+A).
- Familiarity with government health information systems such as RCH, HMIS or ABDM.
- Experience designing cascade or large-scale training programs.
- Experience working with call centres or helpdesks for user support.
- Exposure to M&E, data quality audits and data-driven program management.
Skills
- Strong relationship building and negotiation with senior government officials
- Strategic planning, with the ability to turn plans into clear field action.
- Problem solving and sound judgement under pressure and tight timelines.
- Comfort using data and dashboards to make decisions.
- People leadership, coaching and conflict resolution.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including reports for government and donors.
- High integrity and commitment to public health and community impact.
Compensation and Benefits
- CTC ranging from 18L to 22L Per Annum, depending on the candidate’s experience, skill set, and evaluation based on our internal parameters.
- Relocation support as per the organisation’s policy
- Medical Insurance
- Leave benefits include casual, medical, menstrual, marriage, bereavement, maternity, and paternity leave
- Learning Stipend for pursuing part time/online on the Job Courses aligning to your job Role and capacity enhancement
- Opportunities to represent Khushi Baby and showcase its work at national and international conferences and events.
- Note: The candidate will be on a probationary period for the first 90 days of the contract
How to Apply
Due to the high number of applicants, we will only reach out to those who are shortlisted. Rest assured that your application will be carefully reviewed, and if you are shortlisted, you will receive a call or mail from us