Dr Soumitra Pathare MD MRCPsych PhD is a Consultant Psychiatrist and Director of Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy at the Indian Law Society, Pune, India. His primary interests are in the areas of mental health policy, scaling up mental health services, rights-based care and legislation. He has provided technical assistance the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India in drafting India’s new Mental Health Care Act 2017, which takes a rights-based approach to mental health care and provides for publicly funded universal mental health care. He was also a member of the Mental Health Policy Group appointed by Government of India to draft India’s first National Mental Health Policy released in October 2014. He was the Principal Investigator of QualityRights Gujarat project (2014-2016) which implemented the WHO QualityRights program in 6 public mental health facilities in Gujarat. He is currently involved in scaling up Atmiyata (recognized by WHO as one of 25 innovative community mental health projects across the world) a project to improve access to mental health services in rural areas, by training and mentoring community leaders to provide basic psychological interventions and access to social benefits for a defined rural population. He is Project Director of SPIRIT Hub, a collaborative initiative of Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy ILS (Pune), TRIMBOS (Netherlands), SNEHA (Chennai) and BCCP (Bangladesh) with the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Gujarat funded by NIMH (USA). SPIRIT is scaling up and evaluating 3 universal suicide prevention interventions in a cluster randomised controlled trial. SPIRIT also has capacity building initiatives to improve implementation research capacity in South Asia as well as the capacity of policy makers to use scientific evidence for policy-making.