India Launches SAHI Policy, BODH Benchmark to Govern Health AI

Overview

• Health Minister JP Nadda launched the Secure AI for Health Initiative (SAHI) and the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI (BODH) at the AI Impact Summit.
• Built by IIT Kanpur with the National Health Authority, BODH will benchmark models on diverse, anonymised real-world datasets to test performance, robustness, bias and generalisability before deployment.
• SAHI was presented as a long-term government framework that gives the Centre, states and private partners common guidance for evaluating, adopting and integrating health AI.
• WHO South-East Asia’s Dr Catharina Boehme endorsed the approach, highlighting goals to strengthen care, improve decisions and extend services to underserved communities.
• Officials pointed to interoperable digital health infrastructure and consent-based data protections already in place, while stressing clinician-relevant validation, trust, safety and accountability as priorities.