Patel said that AI has the potential to address these challenges and allow us to achieve health equity but emphasised that AI should not be adopted just as a technological advancement.“INDIA HAS multiple challenges, such as a large and diverse population and so many areas still in our country are still inaccessible, which is why there are variations in access to healthcare, where, because of the geographical complexities we are unable to reach… When we have so many multiple challenges AI can be a force multiplier, ” said Anupriya Patel, Union Minister of State for Health as well as Chemicals and Fertilizers, in Ahmedabad on Saturday.She was delivering the keynote address at the inaugural of the IIMA Healthcare Summit 2026, on the theme – “Advancing AI in Healthcare”.Patel said that AI has the potential to address these challenges and allow us to achieve health equity but emphasised that AI should not be adopted just as a technological advancement. We have to ensure that while we adopt AI, it is able to improve the patient care outcomes and is able to let Healthcare reach those who are underserved or who live in the geographically distant areas where, till date, we have not been able to ensure access to healthcare services.The minister laid out the aspirations of the Government of India xon the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fields of healthcare and pharmaceuticals, admitted the challenges faced by India and exhorted academia and industry to collaborate across the life cycle of AI to bring solutions that could be scaled up at the national level.“What we need for a developed India, is a healthy India. And building a healthy India is not an easy target considering the challenges we have in terms of not just the size of a population but the diversity we have, the geographical complexity, it is not an easy target at all and we have set upon ourselves the goal of achieving universal health coverage,” said the minister, highlighting the challenges.On the use of AI as a force multiplier in drug discovery, Patel said that India would no longer be satisfied with the tag of “pharmacy of the world.” She said, “Our objective is very clear. We don’t want the Indian pharmaceutical industry to keep manufacturing medicines that have been discovered elsewhere. India has long been hailed as the pharmacy of the world. We have been providing generic medicines and vaccines for a large number of countries around the world and everyone is lauding India’s capability. But now we need to move on. We are not going to be satisfied with the label of just being the pharmacy of the world, we want to be the laboratory of the world. Which is why we need AI.”On the use of AI to combat the rising burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) and auto-immune disorders in addition to communicable diseases, the minister added, “Ordinary Humans do not have the capacity to understand these complex connections that exist within our complex human body and this is where AI comes into play. It can help us to process the vast amounts of Information and then identify the patterns which could be of use to our scientists and researchers and doctors. And that is exactly how we intend to use AI and especially it is needed in India because we are not just a vast population, we are also a population that is genetically very diverse… so a treatment that may work on one patient, may not work so well on another patient. So we need smarter tools to understand the new forms of diseases that are emerging. Through the promotion of research and innovation in the pharma-medtech sector (PRIP) scheme, with an outlay of Rs5,000 crore, we are trying to strengthen research, trying to connect education institutions with the industry, and trying to encourage our country to move from cost based manufacturing towards innovation led growth.”Story continues below this adMinister Patel emphasised that AI development should remain safe, responsible, and human centred, one that guarantees privacy. “We firmly believe that any technology should augment our Health Care professionals and support their clinical judgement and it should not replace human accountability. We must ensure at any cost that human accountability can never be replaced by any technological solution,” she said.On scalability at the national level, she said, “Our priority is to move from pilots to population level scale. India must move from validated tools of the pilots to the national programs that we are running using benchmarking to ensure that only the safest and the most effective solutions are able to reach our patients… We really need to collaborate across the entire AI life cycle… You identify the problem, then you think of a solution, when you have developed that solution, you validate it, you implement it, you monitor it and then you scale it up.”The programme also saw the launch of the India Pharma Archives that chronicles the evolution of the Indian pharmaceutical industry, as well as the book “Form labs to jabs” on India’s COVID-19 vaccine development. The event was attended by several officials of the Government of India and Pankaj Patel of Zydus Lifesiences, who is Chairperson of the IIMA Board of Governors.