Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: In a significant step towards regulating and scaling artificial intelligence in public healthcare, Union Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda will on Tuesday launch two landmark national initiatives — a policy roadmap and a testing platform — aimed at ensuring AI tools are safe, accountable and ready for real-world deployment.At the India AI Summit at Bharat Mandapam, Nadda will unveil the Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare for India (SAHI) and BODH, the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI.SAHI lays down the country’s first structured framework to guide how AI should be integrated into hospitals, public health programmes and digital health systems. The strategy makes clear that AI must assist doctors and health workers, not replace them, and should operate within clear guardrails of transparency, accountability and equity. It sets out a national direction on governance, data stewardship, validation standards and responsible deployment, while encouraging innovation aligned with public health priorities.Alongside it, BODH is designed as a national evaluation platform to test AI tools before they are rolled out at scale. Developed by IIT Kanpur in collaboration with the National Health Authority under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, the 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.Officials say the twin initiatives mark a shift from experimentation to structured oversight, as AI tools increasingly enter 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 is seeking to balance innovation with safety in one of the most sensitive sectors — healthcare.The launches come amid the five-day India AI Summit 2026, being 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.
