The Indian Council of Medical Research's (ICMR) flagship initiative, ICMR-MINDS, has been awarded the Gold Award under Category 2 — Innovation by Use of AI and Other New Age Technologies for Providing Citizen-Centric Services — at the National Awards for e-Governance 2026. The award was presented by Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, during the 29th National Conference on e-Governance held in Jaipur, Rajasthan on July 1–2, 2026.
ICMR-MINDS is a National Health Research Priority project that represents an implementation research study on integrating screening and management of mental and substance use disorders with other non-communicable diseases. The platform's Clinical Decision Support System enables task-shifting of standardized mental health screening, assessment, follow-up, and routine management from specialists to trained non-specialist frontline healthcare providers, supported by evidence-based digital decision support.
The digital platform offers standardized digital screening and assessment workflows, role-based clinical guidance, offline functionality, multilingual interfaces, and gamified features to sustain user engagement. It includes real-time administrative dashboards for monitoring service delivery and reduces dependence on specialists. A key feature is its continuity-of-care framework that supports structured referral and bidirectional back-referral pathways, allowing stable patients to receive follow-up care at their nearest health facility while specialists focus on complex cases.
The initiative is being implemented across seven states through seven collaborating institutions: All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Guwahati in Assam; Gujarat Institute of Mental Health (GIMH), Ahmedabad in Gujarat; AIIMS, New Delhi in Haryana; St. John's Medical College, Bengaluru in Karnataka; AIIMS, Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh; AIIMS, Bhubaneswar in Odisha; and Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh in Punjab. The success has been achieved through close collaboration with State Health Departments of Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Punjab, along with State Mental Health and NCD Programme teams, district health authorities, and healthcare professionals across participating states.
Dr Rajiv Bahl, Secretary of the Department of Health Research and Director General of ICMR, stated that ICMR will continue to pioneer data-driven, scalable technology interventions to solve complex public health challenges and remains committed to providing affordable, standardized, and high-quality healthcare platforms for the people of India through ongoing collaboration with participating institutions and state health systems.