Union Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda has unveiled two flagship digital health initiatives, SAHI and BODH, at the India AI Summit in New Delhi to steer the safe, ethical and evidence-based use of artificial intelligence in healthcare delivery across the country. The launch marks a key policy moment for India as it seeks to scale AI from pilot projects to mainstream clinical and public health applications while addressing concerns around patient safety, bias, and data protection.
SAHI provides national guardrails for health AI
SAHI, described as the Strategy for AI in Healthcare for India, has been positioned as a national guidance framework to enable secure, transparent and inclusive adoption of AI technologies in health systems. Nadda called SAHI not just a technology blueprint but a governance framework and policy compass that will guide how AI is evaluated, deployed and monitored in clinical settings. The framework emphasises people centric use of AI, with explicit focus on accountability, interoperability, and safeguards for consent based use of health data.
Officials involved in the drafting process said SAHI was shaped through multi-stakeholder consultations with clinicians, health technology firms, state governments and public health experts across multiple cities, reflecting operational realities from tertiary hospitals to peripheral facilities. International public health leaders have welcomed the move, noting that India is among the first countries in the region to adopt a comprehensive AI in health strategy that ties innovation to universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals.
BODH to benchmark and de-risk AI models
Complementing SAHI, BODH, the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI, has been developed with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the National Health Authority to provide a structured mechanism for testing and validating AI models on diverse, anonymised real world datasets before scale up. The platform is designed to assess performance, robustness, bias and generalisability of algorithms so that only clinically reliable and context appropriate tools reach patients and providers.
BODH operates as a federated data platform, allowing model developers to send their algorithms for training and evaluation without direct access to the underlying patient level data, which remains protected with contributing institutions. Health facilities contributing data will be incentivised, creating a continuous pipeline of updated, high quality datasets that mirror changing disease patterns and care delivery environments. Policymakers expect this approach to reduce the risk of deploying untested or biased AI tools in high stakes clinical workflows.
Digital health backbone seen as enabler
In his address at the summit, Nadda underlined that AI applications in health depend on strong digital public infrastructure, pointing to the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and related health data frameworks as foundational investments made over the past decade. Interoperable systems, consent based data sharing and national health identifiers have created conditions where AI solutions can be integrated responsibly into existing programmes rather than operating as siloed pilots.
Government officials stressed that the AI roadmap aligns with broader Digital India goals and with the IndiaAI Mission, with health positioned as a priority sector alongside agriculture and education. They highlighted that the SAHI and BODH initiatives are intended to encourage innovation from both startups and established players while setting clear expectations around safety, ethics and regulatory compliance.
Implications for patients, providers and innovators
For patients, the initiatives are expected to translate into AI tools that are more rigorously evaluated, transparently governed and better aligned with public health priorities such as early diagnosis, efficient triage and continuity of care in underserved regions. For clinicians and health systems, SAHI provides guidance on when and how AI can be used to support decision making, while BODH offers an independent mechanism to benchmark emerging tools against standardised datasets.
For industry and researchers, a national framework and benchmarking platform may reduce uncertainty around expectations for safety, documentation and performance, potentially shortening the pathway from prototype to deployment for well designed solutions. Experts at the summit noted that India’s move to formalise AI governance in health at this stage of adoption could help the country position itself as a reference point for other low and middle income settings exploring similar technologies.
