ICMR-NIRDHDS & ARTPARK Join Hands to Accelerate Digital Health in India

The stated objective is to link biomedical research with deep-tech innovation so that digital health systems are open, ethical, policy-relevant, and suitable for deployment within national and state health programmes.

ICMR-NIRDHDS has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ARTPARK to deepen collaboration in digital health, data science, and responsible artificial intelligence, bringing together public health expertise and deep-tech innovation.

The collaboration brings together ICMR’s role in public health research and ARTPARK’s capabilities in artificial intelligence, robotics, and large-scale data systems.

The stated objective is to link biomedical research with deep-tech innovation so that digital health systems are open, ethical, policy-relevant, and suitable for deployment within national and state health programmes.

The MoU has been signed against the backdrop of a substantial increase in government funding for health research. In a recent interview, ICMR Director General Dr Rajiv Bahl said, “While the overall health budget has gone up by 9 per cent, the health research component has seen a 24 per cent increase in just one year.” He added that the health research budget has doubled over the last three to four years.

The funding increase coincides with the launch of the Biopharma Shakti programme, which is aimed at strengthening research and development in biological medicines and encouraging product development within the country. “We want products to not just be made in India, but also developed in India,” Dr Bahl said.

Moreover, ARTPARK’s ongoing work provides context for its involvement in digital public infrastructure. Under the BHASHINI initiative, IISc and ARTPARK, in partnership with Google, have completed Project Vaani, which has reached full national coverage.

The open multimodal dataset spans all Indian states and includes speech data across 109 languages and dialects, with more than 31,000 hours of spontaneous speech collected from real-world environments.

Designed to support inclusive and multilingual AI systems, Project Vaani is already being used by research labs and startups to build and deploy speech recognition and voice technologies at scale.

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