By The S Bharat
New Delhi: The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has announced plans to transition from traditional
“detective-style” disease surveillance to a predictive model powered by artificial intelligence (AI), real-time data analytics and digital intelligence platforms. The move is aimed at significantly enhancing public health security and early epidemic preparedness across India.
According to senior officials at the NCDC, the proposed predictive surveillance ecosystem will integrate multiple data streams — including AI-driven outbreak monitoring, laboratory intelligence, climatic indicators, population movement patterns and digital diagnostic insights — to forecast emerging health threats before they escalate.
The initiative builds on the existing AI-based event surveillance system deployed under the Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) of the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP). The Media Scanning and Verification Cell (MSVC) of the IDSP already leverages an advanced AI pipeline that scans millions of online news reports daily in 13 Indian languages, extracting structured information such as disease type, location and scale.
Since 2022, the MSVC platform has processed more than 300 million news articles and flagged over 95,000 unique health-related events, allowing authorities to maintain real-time situational awareness.
Officials stated that shifting toward predictive surveillance will unlock the ability to anticipate outbreak trajectories and initiate preventive measures even before the first clinically detected case emerges. “This marks a major leap in India’s pandemic preparedness,” an NCDC official noted.
The enhanced disease intelligence network is expected to empower health agencies to detect warning signals in advance, deploy rapid response teams, mobilise critical resources and bolster risk mitigation at the district and community levels.
With infectious disease threats becoming increasingly complex due to climate change, urbanisation and global mobility, experts believe the new AI-driven framework will play a pivotal role in safeguarding India’s public health landscape in the years ahead.