SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being | SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure | SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare | Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) | NITI Aayog
The Government of India is leveraging AI-powered diagnostics, telemedicine, and surveillance tools to fulfill its commitment to Universal Health Coverage. Guided by the vision of Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya (Welfare for All, Happiness for All), the Union Cabinet launched the IndiaAI Mission in March 2024 to advance inclusive development and bridge delivery gaps in rural and underserved populations. Significant outcomes include a 27% decline in adverse TB outcomes through AI-enabled tools in the National TB Elimination Programme and over 4,500 outbreak alerts generated by the Media Disease Surveillance System.
A significant highlight is the deployment of the UdyogYantra AI system, which uses image recognition to analyze 2,100 data points to evaluate food quality in schools, ensuring strict adherence to government nutritional menus.
Key Pillars of AI-Enabled Healthcare Transformation
Democratisation of Technology: Ensuring AI tools reach rural segments by empowering non-specialists and frontline workers to perform high-level screenings for TB and diabetic retinopathy.
Disease Control and Clinical Screening: Deploying platforms like MadhuNetrAI for retinal screening and NemoCare Raksha for monitoring over 20,000 newborns.
AI-Assisted Telemedicine:282 million telemedicine consultations have been conducted via eSanjeevani, with 12 million patients receiving AI-recommended differential diagnoses between April 2023 and November 2025.
Nutritional Surveillance: Implementing AI-enabled machines in schools (e.g., in Maharashtra) that use image recognition to analyze 2,100 data points to evaluate food quality against government menus.
Administrative Efficiency: Using tools like Sunoh.Ai, Eka Doc, and Eka Scribe to automate clinical documentation, resulting in a 40% reduction in documentation time and the creation of lakhs of e-prescriptions.
What is “Differential Diagnosis” in AI Telemedicine? Differential diagnosis is a systematic clinical method used to identify a specific condition when multiple diseases present with similar symptoms. In the context of eSanjeevani, AI-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) analyze a patient’s reported symptoms against massive medical datasets to provide doctors with a ranked list of potential conditions. This assistant-level intelligence streamlines the consultation process, helping physicians in remote areas quickly rule out competing possibilities and make more accurate, evidence-based treatment decisions.
Policy Relevance
This transformation represents a shift from “Episodic Treatment” to “Proactive, Data-Driven Care,” positioning India as a global leader in utilizing Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to address specialist shortages in the Global South.
Strategic Impact:
Sovereign Health Intelligence: By creating the world’s largest digital health ecosystem under ABDM—with 799 million ABHA IDs and 671 million linked records—India is building an indigenous data foundation that reduces reliance on western clinical models.
Closing the Specialist Gap: AI tools democratize expertise, allowing India to maximize its 2.5x global AI skill penetration to provide specialist-level screening for its 1.4 billion citizens without waiting for a proportional increase in doctor-to-population ratios.
Achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC): The mission operationalizes the “Leave-No-One-Behind” principle by ensuring that a patient in a remote Tier-3 town has access to the same AI-assisted diagnostic quality as one in a metropolitan hospital.
Economic Resilience and Global Export: India’s success in AI-health—reflected in startups like Qure.ai attracting $125M in global capital—creates a new “Health-Tech Export” category, where India can provide low-cost, scalable digital health solutions to other developing nations.
Relevant Question for Policy Stakeholders: In what ways can the ‘UdyogYantra AI System’ for malnutrition be scaled across the 13.9 lakh Anganwadi centers to provide real-time nutritional tracking for every child under Mission POSHAN 2.0?
Follow the full news here: PIB: Transforming Healthcare Delivery Through Artificial Intelligence