When you set out to build Amaha, what gaps in India’s mental healthcare system stood out the most? How did you plan to address them?
When we began Amaha nine years ago, the gaps were stark. Awareness about mental health was limited, and stigma meant many people delayed or avoided seeking help altogether. For those who did reach out, the cost of sustained treatment often made care inaccessible. And even when care was available, the quality varied widely, evidence-based protocols were rarely applied, and families were left unsure of where to turn or whom to trust.
It became clear to us that these challenges couldn’t be solved in isolation, they had to be addressed together. The deeper problem was that mental healthcare in India remained fragmented and uncoordinated, with very poor penetration of standardised high-quality care, leaving individuals and families to piece together their own support. That’s why our vision has always been to build an integrated continuum of care, spanning digital tools for selfreflection, teleconsultation, outpatient therapy and psychiatry, and specialised inpatient services. By linking these touchpoints together, we aim to ensure that people don’t fall through the cracks but instead move seamlessly through their care journey, whether that means early self-help, ongoing therapy, or intensive clinical support, without disruption or loss of trust.
How has your international experience influenced the way Amaha delivers psychiatric care? Are there practices from other countries that could benefit the wider Indian ecosystem?
My international experience has influenced both my clinical perspective and the way we have built Amaha. In the UK, I saw first hand the value of structured, multidisciplinary teams and the central role of evidence based protocols and supervision. Those lessons have shaped how we deliver psychiatric care at Amaha, with psychiatrists, therapists, and care coordinators working together so that clients are supported across a full continuum of care rather than treated in isolation.
Elements of structured supervision for clinicians, coordinated care models that integrate psychiatric, psychological, and social support, and a stronger emphasis on outcomes measurement could, if adopted more widely, significantly improve both quality and trust in mental healthcare at scale in India. At the same time, no global model can be transplanted as is. India faces its own realities around access, affordability, and stigma that require adaptation. So we have drawn on best practices while tailoring them to this context, combining high clinical standards with innovations in technology, care journeys, and pricing to make support both accessible and scalable.
Running a specialised facility comes with both clinical and financial challenges. How do you strike the balance between high-quality care and sustainability?
I’ve never believed that high-quality care and sustainability are at odds with each other. From the very beginning, our conviction has been that if you build a model anchored in ethics and client centricity, and back it with the right structures and processes, sustainability follows. That’s why we’ve put heavy emphasis on levers that allow us to deliver high-quality care consistently, regardless of location or individual clinician.
For instance, standardised protocols give clinicians clear pathways, making care reliable, repeatable, and less dependent on individual variation. Training, supervision and multidisciplinary collaboration help build capacity across a cohort of clinicians, strengthening the system as a whole rather than just individual practitioners. Additionally, every product feature we build,whether it’s digital treatment plans, user dashboards, or clinician portals, is co-created with clinicians from the very beginning: they shape the conceptualisation, design, and testing alongside our product teams. This ensures that every tool in our ecosystem is clinically sound, usable in practice, and truly supportive of client outcomes. This way our tech ecosystem enables us to widen access, while ensuring quality of care is never compromised.
This enables a model efficient and replicable because then that means what we’ve built in one location can be extended elsewhere, which is how we’ve grown to nine centres, a 27-bed hospital, and a network of over 200 clinicians serving clients across 400+ cities.
Technology is changing healthcare everywhere. How has it helped Amaha improve patient care and operational efficiency? Where do you see the biggest opportunities for the sector?
Technology has helped us at Amaha in two very tangible ways: by improving the quality of care our clients receive, and by making it possible to deliver that care effectively at scale.
On the care side, our platform provides a single entry point into therapy, psychiatry, and more than 500 self-care tools and activities. Instead of fragmented experiences, clients engage through one personalised dashboard where they can book sessions, track progress, chat securely with their clinician, and stay connected between sessions with guided activities and resources. We are piloting an AI-powered matching tool to ensure that clients begin their mental health with the right clinician, while ongoing digital engagement prompts and tools deepens continuity of care. Clinicians benefit just as much: AI-enabled transcriptions and summaries, dashboards that surface trends, and digital homework tools reduce paperwork and free up time for what matters most: the therapeutic relationship.
On the operational side, our tech stack functions like a full-scale operating system for clinics and hospitals. Beyond scheduling, it gives administrators a live view of the entire patient journey. A dedicated portal manages inpatient services end to end, while centralised dashboards track clinician availability, cancellations, and client flow. This visibility helps us optimise staffing, anticipate bottlenecks, and run multiple centres at scale without compromising quality.
So at Amaha, technology has helped us deliver care that is not only more accessible and personalised, but also operationally sustainable, showing how digital innovation can transform both outcomes and efficiency in mental healthcare.
With so few psychiatrists in India, building the right team is crucial yet challenging. How has Amaha approached this? What are the lessons for the industry from your experience?
At Amaha, we realised early on that sustainability couldn’t come just from hiring clinicians. It had to come from building systems that made practising at Amaha attractive, rewarding, and sustainable for psychiatrists.
To begin with, psychiatrists at Amaha don’t work in isolation. They’re part of a multidisciplinary team with therapists so care is continuous and no clinician carries the full burden alone. Our group practice model also means psychiatrists benefit from peer cover during emergencies or leave.
We also offer variety, with our clinicians moving fluidly across settings: outpatient clinics, online care, and our specialised hospital. Beyond consultations, they also have the opportunity to engage in training, supervision, service development, public awareness initiatives, and technology projects.
Lastly, our care team provides all our clinicians with critical support by managing logistics, followups, and client engagement, freeing psychiatrists to focus on deep clinical work. This model ensures our psychiatrists step into roles as partners and leaders, not just practitioners. So we’ve never struggled to build or sustain a strong bench of psychiatrists, even in one of the most talent-constrained fields in India.
How does Amaha’s vision for expanding mental health facilities fit into the bigger picture for India’s mental health ecosystem?
Our vision begins with setting a new baseline for what mental healthcare in India should look like. We believe every individual should have access to benchmark-quality care safe, evidence-based, multidisciplinary, and supervised. Too often, even these basics are absent. By building services that consistently deliver this standard, we want to demonstrate that it is not aspirational, but the minimum individuals seeking support should expect.
Beyond establishing that benchmark, we see ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem effort. For instance, with IMHA, a not-for-profit initiative designed to strengthen mental health systems by connecting stakeholders and building capacity, we work to expand capacity through training and advocacy; and drive awareness through collaborations with media and not-for-profits so that more people recognise when and how to seek help.
Finally, we are committed to innovating for the future of care in ways that allow us to scale without ever compromising on quality. That means introducing treatments like Deep TMS, which open new possibilities for clients who may not have responded to conventional interventions. It also means embedding AI-enabled tools that match clients to the right clinician for themselves or collate session summaries to save clinicians’ time and enable them to focus primarily on delivering care. Together, these innovations allow us to extend benchmark-quality care to far more people than traditional models would permit.
So with nine outpatient centres and now a 27-bed hospital in Bengaluru, Amaha is adding capacity where it is urgently needed, but also modelling what integrated, systemic, and accessible care can look like. The bigger picture is about creating a blueprint that others in the ecosystem can build upon, so together we can raise the standard of care across India.
What’s your take on collaboration? How should hospitals, caregivers, corporates, insurers, and public health organisations work together to strengthen mental healthcare in the country?
Collaboration, to me, is about reimagining capacity rather than just multiplying what already exists. The scale of India’s mental health needs means we cannot solve for it by simply increasing the number of clinicians. We have to build a much broader ecosystem of support. That is precisely why we established IMHA, and adopted an approach that looks beyond the traditional clinical model–where hospitals, caregivers, corporates, insurers, and public health organisations all come in. Hospitals and clinical systems can ensure that all doctors across specialities, not just psychiatrists, are equipped to screen for mental health concerns and signpost people to care.
IMHA also invests in our key community stakeholders: teachers, frontline workers, HR professionals, even the police, people who shape daily realities, can recognise distress early, and connect someone to the care they need. When these pieces come together, we move beyond visibility campaigns or isolated initiatives.
We start to embed mental health into the everyday touchpoints of people’s lives. That is the kind of collaborative change we need to catalyse, to truly strengthen mental health systems in our country.
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