The National Health Authority (NHA) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, IIT Kanpur and the TANUH Foundation to strengthen India’s healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem through the development and expansion of the Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health AI (BODH).

The collaboration aims to establish India-specific, clinically representative and reproducible benchmarks to evaluate healthcare AI systems before their deployment at scale. The initiative is expected to support safer, more reliable and contextually relevant AI applications across India’s healthcare system.

Under the agreement, the institutions will work on the development, maintenance and expansion of the BODH platform. Key areas include building structured health-data resources and data pipelines, developing annotation and ground-truth platforms for benchmark datasets, and creating locally adapted frameworks for evaluating healthcare AI models.

The partnership will combine NHA’s policy leadership and national digital health infrastructure with the academic and technical expertise of IISc, IIT Kanpur and the TANUH Foundation. The initiative will also focus on developing contextual and representative datasets aligned with the Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare in India (SAHI).

The MoU was signed in the presence of Dr. Sunil Kumar Barnwal, Chief Executive Officer, NHA; Prof. Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan of IIT Kanpur; Prof. Phaneendra Yalavarthy, Chief Project Manager, TANUH Foundation; and Prof. Sriram Ganapathy of IISc.

BODH is designed to help researchers and developers assess the performance, robustness, bias and generalisability of AI models using diverse, anonymised real-world health datasets while protecting patient privacy. The platform is intended to provide a structured mechanism for evaluating AI tools before their adoption in clinical and public-health settings.

The initiative builds on the Government of India’s broader efforts to promote responsible healthcare AI. In February 2026, the Union Health Ministry launched SAHI and BODH at the India AI Impact Summit to strengthen governance, validation and accountability in health AI.

The partnership marks a further step towards building a trustworthy and equitable digital health ecosystem in India, with standardised evaluation frameworks intended to support evidence-based AI adoption and strengthen confidence among healthcare professionals, researchers and patients.