Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare and Chemicals and Fertilisers Anupriya Patel on 22 August 2026 called on India to evolve beyond its globally recognised identity as the ‘pharmacy of the world’ and position itself as the ‘laboratory of the world’ — with research, innovation, and artificial intelligence driving the country’s next healthcare leap. She made the remarks at the IIMA Healthcare Summit 2026 in Ahmedabad, hosted by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) on the theme ‘Advancing AI in Healthcare’.

The Core Argument: From Manufacturing to Innovation

Addressing the third edition of the summit, MoS Patel argued that India’s pharmaceutical sector must move beyond producing medicines and vaccines developed abroad and pivot toward original drug discovery and innovation. She cited India’s performance during the Covid-19 pandemic as evidence of the country’s existing strength — the domestic pharmaceutical industry supplied vaccines and essential medical products to more than 200 countries, while India’s vaccination programme administered over 2.2 billion doses. The challenge now, she said, is to build on that foundation rather than rest on it.

AI in Healthcare: Opportunity and Guardrails

MoS Patel outlined several domains where AI could deliver measurable gains: accelerating drug discovery, enabling personalised treatment, improving disease surveillance, and strengthening clinical decision-making and early screening. However, she was emphatic that adoption must be safe, responsible, and human-centred. “AI must complement, not replace, human clinical judgement,” she said, also stressing the need for robust patient privacy safeguards. She called for AI applications to move beyond pilot projects and scale to population-level implementation through sustained collaboration among government, academia, healthcare institutions, startups, and industry. She noted that Centres of Excellence for AI in healthcare have already been established at AIIMS New Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh, and AIIMS Rishikesh.

Government Schemes Backing the Push

MoS Patel highlighted two flagship initiatives underpinning this ambition. The Promotion of Research and Innovation in Pharma-MedTech Sector (PRIP) Scheme, with an outlay of ₹5,000 crore, is designed to strengthen research and industry-academia collaboration and shift the sector toward innovation-led growth. Separately, the Biopharma SHAKTI mission, announced in the Union Budget with a corpus of ₹10,000 crore, targets capabilities in biologics and biosimilars, skilled manpower development, and stronger regulatory and clinical trial infrastructure for the domestic biopharmaceutical ecosystem.

Startups, Data, and the Infrastructure Gap

Department of Pharmaceuticals Secretary Manoj Joshi said AI adoption is already expanding across pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. Large companies are deploying AI in production, human resources, marketing, distribution, and inventory management. Startups — particularly those based in Bengaluru and Hyderabad — are using the technology specifically for drug discovery, he noted. Joshi identified access to capital, software licensing, computing capacity, and specialised talent as key constraints. The government, he said, is working to address these through the National Biopharma Mission and IndiaAI Mission, and is exploring substantial support for eligible startups on software licensing and operational costs. He also stressed the need to make healthcare and genetic data accessible to Indian innovators with appropriate safeguards.

Digital Health Ecosystem and Discover Scale

Health and Family Welfare Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava said the Centre is building a robust digital health ecosystem anchored by the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which has so far created more than 96 crore ABHA IDs and digitally linked over 1,000 crore health records across healthcare facilities and professionals. She highlighted AI-enabled applications already in use for early detection of tuberculosis and diabetic retinopathy, and AI-driven clinical decision support through eSanjeevani, which has reached more than 20 crore patients. The summit also saw the launch of India Pharma Archives — a digital initiative of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance in collaboration with IIM Ahmedabad Archives — to document and preserve the evolution of India’s pharmaceutical industry. A book chronicling India’s Covid-19 vaccine development journey was also released at the event.

With ₹15,000 crore committed across the PRIP and Biopharma SHAKTI schemes and a digital health backbone already at scale, the government’s next test will be translating policy ambition into verifiable innovation outcomes — and demonstrating that India’s laboratory ambitions can match its pharmacy record.