Events

31 Aug 2026

Once a year, the Koita Centre for Digital Health at Ashoka (KCDH-A) pauses its usual rhythm of research and partnership-building to take stock. Annual Day 2026 brought together researchers, clinicians, policymakers, industry leaders, students, and long-standing collaborators for a day that opened with tea, networking, and a facility tour, and moved through institutional reflection, frank conversation, and a look ahead at what the Centre's researchers are working on next. In the opening session, Prof. Somak Raychaudhury, Dr Anurag Agrawal, Dr Aradhita Baral and Mr Rizwan Koita reflected on the year gone by, setting a tone — candid about what has worked and what remains a work in progress — that carried through the rest of the day.

The day's two flagship panels turned the same candid eye on two different questions. What Makes a Good Collaboration, moderated by Dr Anjali Agrawal along with the panelists Mr Vikas Dimble-Isaac Centre for Public Policy, Ashoka University, Dr Roopa Shivshankar-Indian Council of Medical Research, Dr Sanjay Pattanshetty-NIMS University, and Dr Rahul Manchanda-Pushpawati Singhania Hospital and Research Institute, asked what actually moves institutions beyond an MoU into a relationship that creates shared value — surfacing trust, complementary strengths, flexibility, and shared purpose as the real ingredients, alongside a candid look at what could be done better. Professor Shekhar Mande, President of the Indian National Science Academy, then widened the lens with a keynote titled “Career Pathways in the Field of Public and Digital Health,” exploring where scientific institutions fit into a fast-changing health landscape. The afternoon's centrepiece, Simmering a CHAI — a conversation on the Coalition for Health AI moderated by Dr Anurag Agrawal with Dr Mona Duggal-,Council of Medical Research-National Institute for Research in Digital Health, Prof. Ranjith Padinhateeri-Koita Centre for Digital Health- Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Mr Vikas Dwivedi-Independent Consultant for Digital Health Transformation & Applied AI, and Dr Rajeev Sharma-Tata 1mg — treated trustworthy health AI as a slow blend of research, policy, technology, and industry experience, working through questions of data governance, evidence gaps, regulatory pace, and what success would look like for a patient five years on. The day also made space for the next generation: student internship presentations from Shreenand Bhattad, Ved Parikh, and Anirudh Gangadharan, the launch of Youth Ownership of Digital Health (YO.DH) with PATH, a Biomedical Data Summer Programme at Ashoka University (BDSA) showcase, and a Research Frontiers session in which Dr Anindya Das Gupta, Dr Anusuya Chakraborty, Dr Naveen Bhatraju, and Dr Shraddha Karve previewed emerging ideas from KCDH-A's own research pipeline.

Across an honest conversation about what collaboration really costs, a keynote on the purpose of science, an unhurried discussion on building trustworthy AI, and a room full of students staking their own claim in digital health's future, one thread ran underneath it all: patience. The recurring insistence, across panels and speakers, that trust, evidence, and genuine partnership cannot be rushed—however urgent the underlying problems feel—may best reflect where KCDH-A stands as it heads into its next year. What made the day distinctive was not any single session but the consistency of that thread running through very different conversations — from institutional partners reflecting on years of joint work, to a panel deliberately built around resisting haste in AI adoption, to students being handed not just a project credit but an ongoing chapter of their own. Taken together, they suggest a Centre that measures its progress less by the speed of its announcements than by the depth of the relationships, evidence, and people it is building along the way — a fitting note to carry into the year ahead.