Nadda to Unveil National AI Blueprint, Testing Platform for Healthcare
NEW DELHI: In a significant step towards regulating and scaling artificial intelligence in public healthcare, Union Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda is set to launch two landmark national initiatives aimed at ensuring that AI tools are safe, accountable, and ready for real-world deployment.
Key Initiatives
During the India AI Summit at Bharat Mandapam, Nadda will unveil:
- Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare for India (SAHI)
- BODH, the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI
SAHI: A Structured Framework
SAHI lays down the country’s first structured framework to guide how AI should be integrated into hospitals, public health programs, and digital health systems. The strategy emphasizes that AI must assist doctors and health workers, rather than replace them, and should operate within clear guardrails of transparency, accountability, and equity.
This initiative sets forth a national direction on governance, data stewardship, validation standards, and responsible deployment, while encouraging innovation aligned with public health priorities.
BODH: National Evaluation Platform
Alongside SAHI, BODH is designed as a national evaluation platform to test AI tools before their large-scale rollout. Developed by IIT Kanpur in collaboration with the National Health Authority under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, this platform allows AI models to be benchmarked on diverse, real-world health data without sharing or exposing patient information.
The aim is to ensure that AI systems perform reliably across different hospitals, regions, and patient populations.
Shifting from Experimentation to Structured Oversight
Officials indicate that these twin initiatives mark a shift from mere experimentation to structured oversight as AI tools increasingly enter critical areas such as diagnostics, clinical decision support, claims management, and disease surveillance.
By combining a national policy framework with a privacy-preserving testing mechanism, the government seeks to balance innovation with safety in one of the most sensitive sectors—healthcare.
Conclusion
The launches coincide with the five-day India AI Summit 2026, hosted in the Global South for the first time, where health AI has emerged as a key pillar of India’s digital public infrastructure push.
