New Delhi: Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Jagat Prakash Nadda on Tuesday unveiled two key digital health initiatives—SAHI (Secure AI for Health Initiative) and BODH (Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI)—during the India AI Impact Summit 2026.
The launch marks a significant step toward strengthening India’s health-tech ecosystem by promoting the responsible, secure, and ethical integration of artificial intelligence in healthcare. While SAHI aims to provide a comprehensive governance framework for the development and deployment of AI-driven medical solutions, BODH will serve as a dedicated benchmarking platform to evaluate the accuracy, safety, and reliability of health AI models before their large-scale adoption.
The initiatives aim to strengthen India’s healthcare AI ecosystem by establishing structured governance, testing standards, and ethical frameworks for artificial intelligence solutions in the medical sector. SAHI will serve as a national roadmap to promote responsible and secure deployment of AI tools in healthcare, while BODH will provide a benchmarking platform to evaluate AI models for performance, safety, and reliability before large-scale implementation.
The launch underscores the government’s commitment to leveraging technology to enhance healthcare delivery while ensuring transparency, accountability, and patient safety.
1. Frameworks to Guide AI Integration in Healthcare
At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Union Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda officially launched two landmark initiatives — SAHI (Secure AI for Health Initiative) and BODH (Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI). These programmes are designed to establish a clear governance and evaluation framework for artificial intelligence technologies within the healthcare sector, ensuring that AI applications remain safe, transparent, and people-centric.
2. SAHI: A National Roadmap for Responsible AI
SAHI serves as a national roadmap that outlines guidelines for the ethical development, validation, and deployment of AI tools across hospitals, public health programmes, clinical research and digital health systems. It emphasises data stewardship, governance norms, monitoring mechanisms and accountability, with a focus on augmenting, not replacing, clinical decision-making by health professionals.
3. BODH: Testing & Benchmarking Platform for Health AI
The BODH platform, developed by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in collaboration with the National Health Authority, provides an anonymised benchmarking environment where AI models can be tested against real-world health datasets. This aims to evaluate performance, bias, robustness and generalisability before tools are scaled for clinical use.
4. Aligning With India’s Digital Health Vision
Officials highlighted that these initiatives build on India’s earlier digital foundations, such as the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, by integrating strong digital infrastructure and consent-based data frameworks to empower citizens while ensuring privacy, security and ethical compliance.
5. Broader Impact and Collaboration
Beyond policy, the launches at the Summit also underscore India’s commitment to public-private collaboration — bringing together healthcare institutions, technology developers, researchers and policymakers to foster responsible innovation. Leaders stressed the importance of interdisciplinary engagement and continuous validation to maintain public trust in health AI solutions.
Union Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda launched SAHI and BODH on Tuesday.
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The announcement was made at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.
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SAHI (Secure AI for Health Initiative) will provide a governance framework for AI in healthcare.
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BODH (Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI) will evaluate and benchmark AI tools before deployment.
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The move aims to ensure safe, ethical, and transparent use of AI in India’s healthcare system.