India and its neighboring countries officially proclaim victory over the debilitating poliovirus this week.

The World Health Organization's South-East Asia Region -- which includes India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Indonesia, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Timor-Leste -- has been maintaining a polio-free status for the last three years. The last case of the largely childhood disease was reported in India in January 2011.

Plans are now in place to officially certify, and celebrate, the region's eradication of the wild disease March 27, at the WHO regional office in New Delhi, India.

The process toward global polio eradication was established in 1988, when the disease crippled more than 200,000 children yearly in India, which claims millions of poor and uneducated people and where reaching even basic levels of cleanliness and personal hygiene is a great challenge.

In 2009, India still suffered more than half of the world's new cases of polio, 741 out of 1,604.

"Many critics believed that this day would never come, that the polio virus was too firmly entrenched in India, that India would never be polio free," WHO Director-General Margaret Chan announced during a February event, marking the country's long-fought win over polio. "They could point to the country's huge population, high birth rate, dense pockets of poverty, poor sanitation, widespread diarrhea, difficult terrain and resistance to vaccination among some groups."

But, Chan said, "the doubters missed one decisive factor: the power of India's determination to achieve the impossible, to go from the world's heaviest burden of polio cases to zero."

Indian governments "at union, state and district levels" took "decisive" ownership of the fight against the disease, earmarking a great array of resources and what amounted to billions of U.S. dollars for the effort, she said.

The country also demonstrated a "can-do attitude" and "worked together seamlessly with its international partners," including Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, WHO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan said.

"The need to reach every child meant that every nook and cranny of this vast country was crisscrossed by tireless polio workers. It also meant reaching every child in marginalized and migrant populations," said Chan, yet India "met each problem with creativity and innovation."

Pioneering key operational and technical strategies, India "took advantage of new technologies and served as a proving ground for their effectiveness. When better systems to support high-quality performance were needed, India built them. With support from the WHO country office, India built its world-class surveillance system. An efficient and reliable network of laboratories was established to support poliovirus testing and the rapid confirmation of cases."

Said Chan: "India has shown the world that there is no such thing as 'impossible.' This is likely the greatest lesson, and the greatest inspiration for the rest of the world."