Ethics approval: a challenge for public health researchers in India.

There is increasing impetus, interest and opportunity for people working in public health programmes in India to carry out operational research (OR) around relevant programme issues and then publish that in peer-reviewed publications. These published researches are valuable in analysing, documenting and advocating for locally generated evidence to inform policy and practice. Ethics review and approval is an essential step in the process of OR but is often viewed as a barrier rather than a prerequisite of good practice in OR. Journals and peer reviewers are also increasingly requiring approvals from local institutional ethics committees (IECs).