India’s premier biomedical research body has taken a significant step toward closing one of the most consequential gaps in its healthcare system — near-total dependence on imported medical devices and diagnostic technologies. The Indian Council of Medical Research has issued a call for proposals to establish Centres for Advanced Research, known as CARs, dedicated to developing indigenous medical devices and diagnostic tools. Furthermore, the design of this initiative reflects a more sophisticated understanding of why previous efforts in this space have fallen short.
Why India Needs This Initiative Now
The Import Dependency Problem
India’s medical device market is heavily skewed toward imported products. Most advanced diagnostic equipment, imaging systems, surgical instruments and point-of-care testing tools used across Indian hospitals originate from foreign manufacturers. This creates multiple vulnerabilities. It makes Indian healthcare expensive — import costs and foreign exchange exposure feed directly into patient pricing. Moreover, it creates strategic dependency. During supply chain disruptions — as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic — import-reliant healthcare systems face device shortages that domestically capable nations can avoid. Consequently, building indigenous medical technology capacity is not merely an industrial policy goal. It is a patient safety and public health imperative.
The Opportunity for Indian Innovation
India has deep scientific talent, a growing biotechnology ecosystem and one of the world’s largest and most clinically diverse patient populations. That combination creates a genuine opportunity to develop medical devices and diagnostics that are not only made in India but designed specifically for the clinical realities India faces. The ICMR CAR initiative aims to channel that potential into structured, outcome-focused research that bridges the gap between laboratory innovation and real-world clinical application.
What the ICMR CAR Programme Actually Involves
A Targeted Intervention, Not a Broad Grant Scheme
The ICMR CAR programme is not a broad research grant scheme. It is a deliberately targeted intervention. Each selected Centre for Advanced Research will focus on a defined set of unmet clinical needs drawn from a curated list of approximately 100 priority areas that ICMR identified through extensive consultations. This focus is important. Broad grant schemes often produce diffuse research that generates publications but not products. By anchoring funding to a specific list of clinical needs, ICMR is pushing applicants to work on problems that matter to the health system — not just problems that are academically interesting.
Funding Terms
Each selected CAR will receive up to Rs 15 crore over a maximum of five years. This is a substantial commitment by Indian public research funding standards. The five-year horizon also reflects realism about the timelines involved in device development. Medical devices and diagnostics require iterative prototyping, validation, regulatory testing and clinical evaluation. A shorter funding window would create pressure to cut corners on the development process. Furthermore, tying funding to a five-year performance window creates accountability without forcing artificially compressed timelines.
How ICMR Identified the 100 Unmet Clinical Needs
Consultations Across Tier-1, Tier-2 and Tier-3 Cities
The approximately 100 unmet clinical needs at the heart of the programme were not compiled from literature reviews or urban hospital surveys alone. ICMR gathered them through extensive consultations with clinicians across tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 cities. This geographic spread matters enormously. The clinical reality in a district hospital in Madhya Pradesh or a primary health centre in Bihar is radically different from what a specialist encounters at AIIMS Delhi. Moreover, the diseases, diagnostic limitations and device failures that matter most to frontline rural clinicians are often invisible to researchers based primarily in academic medical centres.
Solving for the India That Actually Exists
By gathering unmet needs from practitioners across the entire urban-rural spectrum, ICMR signals that this programme is designed to solve for the India that actually exists — not just the India that appears in urban hospital statistics. This is a meaningful philosophical shift. Too many previous healthcare innovation efforts in India produced solutions optimized for well-resourced settings that were then expected to work in resource-constrained environments. Starting from the frontline clinical perspective reverses that logic. Solutions designed for district hospitals and primary health centres can always be refined upward. Solutions designed for tertiary centres rarely scale downward effectively.
Why Geographic Breadth of Consultation Matters
India’s disease burden, infrastructure capacity and clinical workflow norms vary dramatically across geographies. A diagnostic tool designed without input from tier-3 clinicians may require infrastructure, skilled operators or consumables that simply do not exist in those settings. Additionally, the most urgent unmet needs in rural India — rapid diagnostic tools for infectious diseases, low-cost point-of-care devices, durable equipment for inconsistent power supplies — are fundamentally different from what tier-1 city clinicians prioritize. The CAR programme’s multi-tier consultation process is therefore not just methodologically sound. It is essential for ensuring the resulting devices will actually be adopted and used where they are needed most.
What Sets This Effort Apart From Previous Attempts
Several previous Indian government initiatives have attempted to stimulate indigenous medical device development. Most encountered the same structural failure: research institutions produced prototypes that never reached commercialization because the pathway from laboratory to market was not designed into the programme from the start. The ICMR CAR initiative addresses this by anchoring research to specific clinical needs identified by practicing clinicians — not just scientific curiosity — and funding institutions over a timeline realistic for device development. Furthermore, the curated needs list means investors and industry partners can see a clear set of problems that the Indian health system is willing to support solutions for. That clarity reduces the risk for potential commercial partners considering collaboration with CAR institutions.
What Success Would Mean for India’s Healthcare System
If the ICMR CAR programme achieves its goals, the implications extend well beyond device manufacturing statistics. Affordable, indigenously developed diagnostic tools would reduce the cost of essential testing for patients across India’s public and private healthcare system. Devices designed for Indian clinical realities would perform more reliably in the environments where they are deployed. Additionally, a track record of successful device development would build the skills, institutions and investor confidence needed to sustain medical technology innovation in India over the long term. The CAR initiative is not just about replacing imports. It is about building the foundational capabilities that India needs to become a genuine contributor to global medical technology — not just a consumer of it.
