NEW DELHI: The central government signed commercial agreements to take government-funded Artificial Intelligence technology for predicting premature births out of the laboratory into hospitals, as Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh launched the outcomes of the decade-long GARBH-INi research programme at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on Monday.
“The children born today will define the country's strength and productivity in 2047,” said Singh adding” “Initiatives like GARBH-INi are part of a larger national mission linking science with long-term nation-building.”
At the event, the government signed technology transfer and deployment agreements with three private companies to roll out risk-prediction tools and gut-bacteria-based treatments developed under the programme.
Every year, India loses more newborns to premature birth than almost any other country. Babies born before 37 weeks face a far higher risk of dying in their first days or living with lifelong health problems. For decades, doctors have had few ways to know in advance which pregnancies were most at risk.
GARBH-INi, run by the Department of Biotechnology, enrolled 12,000 pregnant women across India, one of South Asia's largest pregnancy studies, collecting 1.6 million biological samples and one million ultrasound images. From that data, scientists built AI models to estimate pregnancy duration and flag early labour risk using patterns drawn entirely from Indian women and based not Western hospital data.
The minister said the initiative has successfully enrolled around 12,000 pregnant women, creating one of South Asia’s largest pregnancy cohorts. The programme has generated a vast repository of over 1.6 million well-characterised biospecimens and more than one million ultrasound images, forming a strong foundation for advanced research.
Most medical AI in use today was trained on patients in Europe or the United States. Indian women have different body types, diets, gut bacteria and genetic profiles and a tool built for one population can miss warning signs in another.
The Minister also released a compendium documenting the programme's key findings, and announced the GARBH-INi-DRISHTI data-sharing platform to give researchers across India access to the biorepository.
NITI Aayog Member Dr VK Paul, who attended the event, called on the programme to now focus on "effectively utilising the tools and predictive models developed so far."