Aadhaar Meets AI: Inside The Govt’s Plan For a Health Data Empire

On 15 July, the Centre released the ‘blueprint’ of its plan to set up a health data empire in India. Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Dr Harsh Vardhan, unveiled the ‘National Digital Health Blueprint’, saying that he was ‘taking an oath to achieve a new dream’ – of a digitised healthcare ecosystem. Among the key principles of the datafication of India’s medical ecosystem is a unique health ID for citizens, with Aadhaar as a key identifier. What the blueprint essentially does is lay out the ‘building blocks’ for the implementation of the National Health Stack (NHS), which aims to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) in leveraging health records.