ICMR-MINDS receives Gold Award at National Awards for e-Governance 2026

The Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) flagship initiative, ICMR-MINDS, has received 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, instituted by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG), Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions.

The award was presented by Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, in the presence of Col. Rajyavardhan Rathore, Minister for Information Technology and Communication, Government of Rajasthan; Shri V. Srinivas, Chief Secretary, Government of Rajasthan; and Smt. Nivedita Shukla Verma, Secretary, DARPG and Department of Pension & Pensioners’ Welfare, Government of India. The presentation took place during the 29th National Conference on e-Governance (NCeG) 2026, held in Jaipur, Rajasthan, on July 1–2, 2026.

ICMR-MINDS is a National Health Research Priority project and an implementation research study on the integration of screening and management of mental and substance use disorders with other non-communicable diseases.

According to ICMR, the initiative’s Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) enables task-shifting of standardised 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 platform provides standardised digital screening and assessment workflows, role-based clinical guidance, offline functionality, multilingual interfaces and gamified features to support user engagement. It also includes real-time administrative dashboards for monitoring service delivery and reducing dependence on specialists.

According to ICMR, the platform’s continuity-of-care framework supports structured referral and bidirectional back-referral pathways, enabling stable patients to receive follow-up care at their nearest health facility while specialists focus on complex cases. The council stated that this framework optimises specialist time, supports frontline healthcare providers in delivering standardised mental healthcare, improves treatment adherence, reduces the burden on tertiary care centres and reduces patient dropout across the continuum of care.

The initiative is being implemented across seven states through seven collaborating institutions: All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Guwahati, Assam; Gujarat Institute of Mental Health (GIMH), Ahmedabad, Gujarat; AIIMS, New Delhi, Haryana; St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, Karnataka; AIIMS, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh; AIIMS, Bhubaneswar, Odisha; and the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, Punjab.

Reacting to the recognition, Dr Rajiv Bahl, Secretary, Department of Health Research, and Director General, ICMR, said, “ICMR will continue to pioneer data-driven, scalable technology interventions to solve complex public health challenges. Through ongoing collaboration with participating institutions and state health systems, ICMR remains committed to providing affordable, standardised, and high-quality healthcare platforms for the people of India.”

According to ICMR, the implementation of ICMR-MINDS has involved collaboration with the State Health Departments of Assam, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Punjab, along with State Mental Health and Non-Communicable Disease Programme teams, district health authorities, principal investigators, co-principal investigators, healthcare professionals and field teams across the participating states.