Innovation with impact: India’s moment to build a win‑win medtech innovation ecosystem

India is among the top five economies in the world, home to some of the most sophisticated engineering institutions on the planet, and the site of a healthcare system serving 1.4 billion people across extraordinary clinical diversity. The next frontier is innovation, moving beyond assembly and imports towards designing and developing world-class medical technologies at home. Closing that gap represents one of the most significant economic and public health opportunities available to India today.

The foundations for this transition are already firmly in place. States including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh are building cluster-based medical device parks that are attracting sustained industry investment. The Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme has demonstrated that targeted policy support can shift manufacturing behaviour at scale. Global technology companies are establishing innovation centres in India, expanding work in imaging, connected care and digital health. The pieces exist and India is now well positioned to connect them into a coherent innovation ecosystem where ideas move from lab to clinic to global market.

This is the next step in a journey that India has already begun with considerable success. Countries that have built globally competitive MedTech industries, Israel, Ireland and the Boston corridor in the United States did so by anchoring innovation clusters that combined clinical insight, engineering excellence and commercial ambition. India has all three ingredients, and the momentum to bring them together deliberately through policy, investment and collaboration.

The PLI scheme offers a useful and proven template. It demonstrated that incentive-linked frameworks can catalyse domestic capability quickly and at scale. Building on this success, extending similar structures to reward R&D, design and intellectual property creation would signal to global and domestic investors alike that India is ready to move up the value chain. Countries that have taken this step consistently attract long-term innovation investment, not just contract manufacturing.

India’s public institutions are already showing what is possible. IIT Madras is developing portable ultrasound devices for rural cancer screening (Intuitive, IIT Madras to Build Affordable Portable Ultrasound for Rural Breast Cancer Screening, (AIIMS and IIT Delhi have built tele-robotic ultrasound systems that extend specialist diagnostics to remote regions). The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has issued over 840 million interoperable health IDs, creating the data infrastructure that next-generation AI-enabled devices will depend upon. SAHI and BODH launched at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, together form a national framework for responsible, evidence-based AI adoption in healthcare, with BODH providing a privacy-preserving platform to benchmark AI models on real-world clinical data.

Perhaps the most compelling example of what collaboration can achieve is the partnership between AIIMS New Delhi, Wadhwani AI and the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. By combining public clinical infrastructure with government-backed AI expertise, they co-developed and validated AI solutions for chest X-ray interpretation that have now reached over 178 million lives (AIIMS CoE to scale AI solutions from Wadhwani AI; Chest xray | AI for Social Impact – Wadhwani AI). That is not a pilot, it is proof of concept at population scale, and it points directly to the model India is well placed to replicate across diagnostics, chronic disease management and primary care.

Strengthening the supplier ecosystem will be equally important. Supporting specialised networks of precision engineering firms, electronics manufacturers and component suppliers through skills development and stable policy frameworks will deepen India’s MedTech value chain. Programmes such as the National Biopharma Mission and government-funded centres of excellence at premier institutions are already building this interdisciplinary capability, creating a pipeline of talent and technology that the sector can draw upon as it scales.