In a major push to modernise India’s healthcare regulatory ecosystem, IndiaAI has partnered with the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) to launch the CDSCO-IndiaAI Health Innovation Acceleration Hackathon.

Under the initiative, India's startups and companies are invited to build AI-powered solutions that can automate regulatory workflows and strengthen privacy safeguards. 

The initiative, launched on April 2 under the IndiaAI Application Development Initiative (IADI), aims to accelerate approvals across critical healthcare innovation pipelines.  

The competition carries strong commercial incentives. The top 10 teams from Stage 1 will be invited for a five-day on-premises development sprint at the CDSCO office in New Delhi. The winning team will receive up to Rs 10 lakh, along with an opportunity to secure a one-year work contract worth up to Rs 50 lakh for deployment and integration of the solution. The second and third prizes carry awards of up to Rs 7 lakh and Rs 3 lakh, respectively, while an all-women team stands to win a special prize of up to Rs 5 lakh. 

Applications are open till April 17, 2026, through the AIKosh portal, positioning the hackathon as a strategic opportunity for AI startups building in healthtech, regtech, privacy engineering, and workflow automation. 

The two-stage hackathon is designed to develop an end-to-end AI solution for CDSCO’s regulatory systems. In the first stage, participants will focus on creating a robust data anonymisation engine and intelligent document summarisation tools capable of extracting and standardising information from SUGAM applications, Serious Adverse Event narratives, and meeting transcripts. The proposed systems are also expected to automate missing-field detection, case severity classification, document version comparison, and generation of formal inspection reports from handwritten notes. 

In the second stage, shortlisted teams will refine their models using proprietary CDSCO datasets and work towards integration with the SUGAM and MD Online portals, aiming to significantly reduce regulatory turnaround times and improve access to healthcare innovations in India.