Artificial intelligence can transform healthcare but must be governed by strong ethics, robust regulation and an unwavering focus on equity to truly serve people, Union Health Minister J P Nadda has said. Addressing a side event on “Artificial Intelligence in Health: Laws, Ethical Oversight, Research and Equity” at the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, he warned that AI could either bridge healthcare gaps or deepen inequities depending on how it is designed, deployed and regulated.
Nadda underlined that India is building its AI journey on the foundations of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and a trusted, interoperable health data ecosystem to ensure patient safety, accountability and transparency. He highlighted the Strategy for AI in Healthcare for India (SAHI), launched earlier this year, describing it as a comprehensive, people-centric framework from the Global South to steer AI innovation ethically and transparently.
To operationalise safe and inclusive AI, the minister pointed to BODH, the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI, which evaluates AI tools against real-world datasets to check their performance across India’s diverse population and settings. He stressed that digitisation and data alone are not enough to improve health outcomes, and called for rigorous research, clinical validation and continuous oversight before AI solutions are scaled in clinical practice.
Calling for global cooperation, Nadda said no country can manage AI’s risks and opportunities in isolation and urged partnerships to strengthen governance norms, research collaborations and ethical standards worldwide. “Innovation must be guided by regulation, scale must be earned through trust, and technological advancement must remain anchored in equity, ethics and public good,” he said, adding that the future of AI in healthcare will be determined more by collective human choices than by algorithms themselves.
