Robotic surgery is gaining momentum in India as hospitals and patients increasingly turn to advanced minimally invasive procedures. According to Grand View Research, the country saw a rising preference for robotic surgery in the post-pandemic period, with a share of around 54.3% in 2022, while the broader surgical robotics market continues to expand rapidly.
Against this backdrop, Dr. Sudhir Srivastava, Founder, Chairman & CEO of SS Innovations International Inc., explains how SSI Mantra was designed to solve one of Indian healthcare’s biggest gaps: the high cost and limited accessibility of robotic surgery beyond elite urban hospitals. In this conversation, he discusses how the indigenous multi-specialty platform is helping make advanced robotic procedures more affordable, scalable, and available across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, while also supporting complex cardiac, oncology, and other specialty surgeries through telesurgery and training-led adoption.
What specific unmet need in access to robotic surgery did you design SSI Mantra to solve first, and how big is that gap in India today?
SS Innovations International developed SSI Mantra with a very clear objective: to make advanced robotic surgery accessible beyond a small cluster of elite urban hospitals. For years, robotic surgery in India remained constrained by extremely high acquisition costs, expensive consumables, and limited surgeon access, which meant that patients in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities often had little or no access to minimally invasive robotic procedures.
SSI Mantra was designed as an indigenous, multi-specialty robotic surgical platform that could significantly reduce the economic barriers associated with robotic surgery while maintaining advanced clinical capabilities such as articulated robotic instruments, high definition three-dimensional visualisation, tremor filtration and precise minimally invasive access. The larger vision was not only technological self-reliance for India, but also democratization of robotic surgery across cardiac surgery, oncology, gastrointestinal surgery, urology, gynaecology, thoracic surgery, and paediatrics.
In one sentence, what can SSI Mantra do across specialties and especially cardiac that existing global robotic systems either cannot do or cannot do cost-effectively?
SSI Mantra combines cost-efficient multi-specialty robotic surgery with advanced telesurgery and tele-proctoring capability, enabling highly complex procedures, including robotic beating heart Totally Endoscopic Coronary Artery Bypass, mitral valve replacement, gastrointestinal and gynaecologic oncology surgeries, thoracic procedures, paediatric surgery, and advanced urologic reconstruction at a scale and affordability specifically designed for emerging healthcare systems.
What are the main barriers that still limit the adoption of robotic surgery in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and what concrete elements of your technology, pricing, and training model are built to overcome them?
The biggest barriers continue to be infrastructure costs, shortage of trained robotic surgeons, concentration of expertise in metro cities, and the perception that robotic surgery is financially viable only for premium hospitals. In many smaller cities, hospitals also struggle with access to advanced surgical mentorship and robotic training ecosystems.
SSI Mantra addresses these challenges through indigenous manufacturing, lower total procedural cost, reusable instrumentation strategy, modular robotic architecture and an integrated training and clinical support model. The platform’s teleproctoring and telesurgery capabilities are particularly important because they allow expert surgeons to remotely mentor and support procedures performed in geographically distant centres.
SS Innovations International has also invested heavily in surgeon education and operating room training so that robotic surgery becomes clinically scalable rather than institutionally exclusive. The idea is to create an ecosystem where advanced minimally invasive surgery is no longer limited by geography.
Can you share one or two specific examples where SSI Mantra enabled a complex cardiac or oncology case that would likely not have been attempted or would have been riskier without this system?
One of the most important milestones was the world’s first robotic cardiac telesurgeries performed between Gurugram and Jaipur using SSI Mantra. Surgeons successfully conducted robotic Internal Mammary Artery Harvesting and Robotic Beating Heart Totally Endoscopic Coronary Artery Bypass remotely over a long distance with ultra-low latency. This demonstrated that highly specialized cardiac robotic procedures could potentially be delivered to regions lacking immediate access to elite cardiac surgeons, without compromising precision or control.
Another landmark achievement was India’s first robotic mitral valve replacement using the indigenous SSI Mantra system at Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences, Bengaluru. Mitral valve replacement is a technically demanding intracardiac procedure requiring exceptional precision, stable visualization, and fine robotic dexterity within confined operative spaces. The robotic approach enabled minimally invasive access while reducing the trauma associated with conventional open sternotomy procedures.
If we look 5 to 10 years ahead, what concrete metrics will tell you that SS Innovations has truly democratised robotic surgery, the number of systems, countries, proportion of cases in public and teaching hospitals, or something else?
The real measure of democratization will not simply be the number of robotic systems installed globally. It will be whether robotic surgery becomes routinely available across Tier 2 and Tier 3 hospitals, public institutions, academic medical centres and teaching hospitals rather than remaining concentrated in a handful of premium urban facilities.
Success will also be measured by how much procedural costs are reduced for patients, how many surgeons across specialties are trained in robotic techniques, how widely telesurgery networks are integrated into healthcare systems, and whether advanced robotic procedures become accessible in regions that previously lacked specialist surgical expertise.
As of May 2026, SSI Mantra had already crossed 10,500 cumulative surgeries across more than 200 installed systems in 11 countries, including over 500 cardiac procedures and 170 telesurgeries. For SS Innovations International, those numbers are only the beginning. The larger mission is to make robotic surgery geographically distributed, clinically scalable, and economically sustainable for healthcare systems worldwide.
