 Dear friends, I am Dr. Karthik Nagesh, I am Chairman of Neonatology at the Manipal Hospitals Group. We warmly welcome you to this IAP Neocon 2019 which has been held in this beautiful city of Bangalore. Manipal Hospitals has been at the forefront of neonatology in these last three decades almost in terms of cutting-edge technology, pioneering therapies, neonatal academics and research. We proudly welcome you to the city of Bangalore and I as also the organizing chairman of IAP Neocon 2019 welcome you to this wonderful conference where advancing frontiers in neonatology are going to be discussed. Our journey started about three decades back when for probably one of the first few centres in the country we started the field of newborn intensive care in this hospital city of Bangalore. At that time we were probably one of the first centres in the country to start critical care for sick babies. We have got a very, very large team of dedicated, highly experienced, trained professionals who are up to doing anything the advanced techniques in newborn intensive care including mothers with high-risk deliveries. Today I am so happy to say that starting from a 12-bed NICO, we are now a large 30-bed neonatal unit. We are able to deliver the best of care for high-risk pregnancies which includes, for example, the IVF babies, mothers with all kinds of medical problems including babies with diagnosed antinatal problems of defective problems in the babies, for example, the congenital heart diseases, congenital diaphragmatic hernias. We are able to successfully treat them safely here and babies go home well. I think Manipal Hospital is the place to be in this part of the region. Probably we are the major referral centre for such sick babies in this country.