SIH26045/MedTech / BioTech / HealthTech

Ayurveda IP and regulatory RAG assistant

A multilingual web assistant that uses retrieval-augmented generation to answer intellectual property and regulatory questions for Ayurveda practitioners and startups, citing specific laws and keeping national and international rules separate.

Ministry of Ayush · All India Institute of Ayurveda · Software

Teams already in: Not read yet
Buildable in 36 hours: ModerateOur estimate, from their wording
Hard blockers: NoneNothing you must source first
Submissions close: 15 Sept9 days left

Make this one of our two Compare with others

Signing in saves it for your whole team — everyone on your invite link sees the same two entries. Anything you shortlisted while signed out comes with you.

Submit on sih.gov.in Dataset

Whether this suits your team

Why this fits you

This organisation declared winners on 5 problem statement(s) in SIH 2025 and on 5 in SIH 2024. It has awarded 6 joint winner(s), so it sometimes splits a prize between two teams.

What you would have to build

Decomposed from what the description asks for. Nothing added.

01
Formulation Classification Flow
A questionnaire module that asks minimum clarifying questions to classify an Ayurvedic product into categories like classical medicine or new drug.
02
Jurisdiction Toggle
A UI component that switches between national and international legal frameworks and keeps the answer sets visibly separate.
03
RAG and Source Citation Engine
A retrieval-augmented generation engine that answers queries while citing the specific statute, treaty article, or registry record.
04
Multilingual Delivery Interface
An interface supporting national languages, leveraging language infrastructure such as Bhashini.
05
Guardrails and Escalation
A system providing mandatory legal disclaimers, safe abstention on uncertain queries, and an escalation path to a human IP facilitator.

What they ask for, and what they leave open

Both columns are read off the brief's own wording. Nothing here is inferred from the ministry's name.

They state

The jury will check answer accuracy, citation correctness, safe abstention on out-of-scope queries, and multilingual quality. They will also test if the jurisdiction toggle keeps national and international rules separate.

They never say

Specific UI/UX wireframes or designs
List of exact databases and URLs to scrape for the initial corpus

A jury can still ask about these. Decide them deliberately rather than by accident.

What they'll ask you

Generated from the brief's own wording and the competition's published rules — never from a guess about what this ministry prefers.

Specific UI/UX wireframes or designs?
The brief never answers this, so a panel will. Whatever you decide, say it the same way twice.
List of exact databases and URLs to scrape for the initial corpus?
The brief never answers this, so a panel will. Whatever you decide, say it the same way twice.
Has any part of this been shown at a previous event, hackathon or college project?
The guidelines are explicit: your solution must not have appeared in any previous event or programme, of any sort. A recycled project is what a team under time pressure reaches for.

9 more— the ones a panel gets to if there is time

The brief asks for formulation classification flow. How would you build that?
Decoded from SIH26045 itself — A questionnaire module that asks minimum clarifying questions to classify an Ayurvedic product into categories like classical medicine or new drug. The brief asks for it by name.

The data

What the organisers attached, and what the brief assumes you can get.

Dataset from the organisers: Provided — open it
Does the brief need data?: Yes, and they gave it to you.

Also from Ministry of Ayush

Same organisation, same year. Reading two of theirs tells you more about what they care about than reading one.

Take this to an AI

Pick what you are about to do and copy the prompt. It carries the organisers' own wording, the constraints they never spell out, and an instruction not to invent requirements they never set.

Who has this problem, what already exists, and what you would have to find out.

# Context: India's Smart India Hackathon 2026

I am on a student team entering SIH 2026. Problem statement SIH26045, set by Ministry of Ayush.
Its official title, word for word: "IP-SAKTI Sahayak a multilingual, RAG-based (source-cited) AI assistant for Intellectual Property and regulatory guidance in Ayurveda, across national and international regimes."
Theme: MedTech / BioTech / HealthTech. Category: software.

In plain terms: A multilingual web assistant that uses retrieval-augmented generation to answer intellectual property and regulatory questions for Ayurveda practitioners and startups, citing specific laws and keeping national and international rules separate.

## The organisers' full description, verbatim

Background: Ayurveda rests on a vast corpus of codified and community-held traditional knowledge (TK) and on therapeutics derived from plant, microbial and animal sources. Protecting and commercialising an Ayurvedic product means navigating several overlapping regimes at once: patents, geographical indications (GI), trademarks, copyright, designs, trade secrets and plant-variety rights; the Access-and-Benefit-Sharing duties that flow from Indiaâ€™s sovereignty over its biological resources; and the drug-regulatory framework that decides whether a formulation is a classical medicine, a proprietary medicine, a new drug, a phytopharmaceutical, a food or a cosmetic. Practitioners, researchers, AYUSH startups and MSMEs and cultivators routinely struggle with this. The result is twofold: legitimate Ayurvedic innovation is under-protected and under-commercialised, while Indiaâ€™s traditional knowledge remains exposed to misappropriation abroad. Recent shifts â€” the 2024 patent and biodiversity rules, the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (2024) and a fast-moving advertising and regulatory landscape â€” make authoritative, plain-language guidance more necessary than ever, yet no such tool exists for the AYUSH community. Description: The assistant answers IPR questions specific to Ayurveda with accuracy, source citation and jurisdictional clarity, keeping the national and the international layers distinct through an explicit jurisdiction switch so that answers are never conflated. Because intellectual property for an Ayurvedic product is inseparable from how the product is regulated, the assistant first helps classify the formulation. It asks the minimum clarifying questions to determine whether the product is a classical/generic medicine (formulation and method drawn from a First-Schedule authoritative text), a patent-or-proprietary medicine, a new or non-classical drug requiring proof of safety and effectiveness, a phytopharmaceutical, an Ayurveda-Aahar / nutraceutical, or a cosmetic â€” and then states what each category requires and its very different IP and ABS posture. For example, a classical formulation is largely traditional knowledge that faces the Section 3(p) patenting bar and is defended through the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, whereas a new drug gains genuine patent potential but must generate clinical evidence. National coverage spans the Patents Act (and the 2024 Rules), the GI, Trade Marks, Designs, Copyright and Plant-Variety regimes, the Biological Diversity Act (as amended in 2023, with the 2024 Rules) and the allied drug, advertising, labelling and food/cosmetic regimes â€” the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act and the FSSAI Ayurveda-Aahar regulations. International coverage separately spans TRIPS, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO GRATK Treaty, the PCT, the Madrid and Hague systems, the Budapest Treaty (for micro-organism deposits) and the herbal-product market-access regimes of key export markets. The assistant also facilitates access to authoritative sources â€” free official databases directly and the userâ€™s own paid subscriptions only with explicit, logged permission â€” so that a user can move from a question to the right registry, record or form. It must cite the specific statute, rule, treaty article or record it relies on; clearly state that it provides information and not legal advice; keep its corpus current as the law changes; and never fabricate authority. Expected solution: A deployable, multilingual assistant built on retrieval-augmented generation grounded in a curated, version-tracked corpus of statutes, rules, treaties, pharmacopoeial standards, registry records and case law, so that every answer is traceable to a source and hallucination is minimised. The solution should provide: a jurisdiction toggle (India vs international) with the two answer-sets kept visibly separate; routing across IP types together with the formulation-classification flow; an ABS-compliance helper and a TKDL / prior-art pointer; mandatory source citations with a confidence indicator and a path to escalate to a human IP facilitator; multilingual delivery (leveraging national language infrastructure such as Bhashini); and guardrails, a standing 'information, not legal advice' disclaimer and privacy, audit and security aligned to the Digital Personal Data Protection regime and to recognised AI-application standards. A relational knowledge graph and agentic, multi-source orchestration deepen multi-step reasoning and the build can be staged â€” a citation-grounded retrieval MVP first, then the graph and agentic layers, then paid-source connectors and the full multilingual and voice experience. The output should be evaluable on answer accuracy, citation correctness, safe abstention on out-of-scope or uncertain queries and multilingual quality.

## What the brief never says

- Specific UI/UX wireframes or designs
- List of exact databases and URLs to scrape for the initial corpus
## Constraints that are not negotiable

- The judged build is a prototype demonstrated in roughly 36 hours by students, not a product.
- A jury evaluates it against this problem statement's own wording, not against general merit.
- We submit on sih.gov.in; the problem statement number and title above must match exactly.
- Your solution must not have appeared in any previous event or programme, of any sort.
- The organisers attached a dataset, so build against theirs rather than inventing one.

## What I want from you

1. Who actually has this problem in India, and what they do about it today.
2. What already exists — government systems, open-source projects, published research — that we should not rebuild.
3. For each item under 'what the brief never says', what the realistic answer is likely to be and how I could verify it.
4. The two or three things about this domain that a student team would get wrong without local knowledge.
## How to answer

- Everything above between quotation marks is the organisers' own wording. Treat it as the requirement.
- Do NOT invent requirements the brief does not state. If something matters and is not stated, say so and ask me, rather than assuming.
- Where you are inferring rather than reading, mark it as your inference.
- Do not guess what this ministry wants from its name. Its wording above is the only evidence.

---
Problem statement facts assembled by Wynit from Ministry of Ayush's published brief for SIH 2026.
The plain-English summary, the list of parts and the evaluator read are our interpretation of that text; the quoted title and the full description are theirs.

The government's original description (685 words)

Background: Ayurveda rests on a vast corpus of codified and community-held traditional knowledge (TK) and on therapeutics derived from plant, microbial and animal sources. Protecting and commercialising an Ayurvedic product means navigating several overlapping regimes at once: patents, geographical indications (GI), trademarks, copyright, designs, trade secrets and plant-variety rights; the Access-and-Benefit-Sharing duties that flow from Indiaâ€™s sovereignty over its biological resources; and the drug-regulatory framework that decides whether a formulation is a classical medicine, a proprietary medicine, a new drug, a phytopharmaceutical, a food or a cosmetic. Practitioners, researchers, AYUSH startups and MSMEs and cultivators routinely struggle with this. The result is twofold: legitimate Ayurvedic innovation is under-protected and under-commercialised, while Indiaâ€™s traditional knowledge remains exposed to misappropriation abroad. Recent shifts â€” the 2024 patent and biodiversity rules, the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (2024) and a fast-moving advertising and regulatory landscape â€” make authoritative, plain-language guidance more necessary than ever, yet no such tool exists for the AYUSH community. Description: The assistant answers IPR questions specific to Ayurveda with accuracy, source citation and jurisdictional clarity, keeping the national and the international layers distinct through an explicit jurisdiction switch so that answers are never conflated. Because intellectual property for an Ayurvedic product is inseparable from how the product is regulated, the assistant first helps classify the formulation. It asks the minimum clarifying questions to determine whether the product is a classical/generic medicine (formulation and method drawn from a First-Schedule authoritative text), a patent-or-proprietary medicine, a new or non-classical drug requiring proof of safety and effectiveness, a phytopharmaceutical, an Ayurveda-Aahar / nutraceutical, or a cosmetic â€” and then states what each category requires and its very different IP and ABS posture. For example, a classical formulation is largely traditional knowledge that faces the Section 3(p) patenting bar and is defended through the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, whereas a new drug gains genuine patent potential but must generate clinical evidence. National coverage spans the Patents Act (and the 2024 Rules), the GI, Trade Marks, Designs, Copyright and Plant-Variety regimes, the Biological Diversity Act (as amended in 2023, with the 2024 Rules) and the allied drug, advertising, labelling and food/cosmetic regimes â€” the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act and the FSSAI Ayurveda-Aahar regulations. International coverage separately spans TRIPS, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO GRATK Treaty, the PCT, the Madrid and Hague systems, the Budapest Treaty (for micro-organism deposits) and the herbal-product market-access regimes of key export markets. The assistant also facilitates access to authoritative sources â€” free official databases directly and the userâ€™s own paid subscriptions only with explicit, logged permission â€” so that a user can move from a question to the right registry, record or form. It must cite the specific statute, rule, treaty article or record it relies on; clearly state that it provides information and not legal advice; keep its corpus current as the law changes; and never fabricate authority. Expected solution: A deployable, multilingual assistant built on retrieval-augmented generation grounded in a curated, version-tracked corpus of statutes, rules, treaties, pharmacopoeial standards, registry records and case law, so that every answer is traceable to a source and hallucination is minimised. The solution should provide: a jurisdiction toggle (India vs international) with the two answer-sets kept visibly separate; routing across IP types together with the formulation-classification flow; an ABS-compliance helper and a TKDL / prior-art pointer; mandatory source citations with a confidence indicator and a path to escalate to a human IP facilitator; multilingual delivery (leveraging national language infrastructure such as Bhashini); and guardrails, a standing 'information, not legal advice' disclaimer and privacy, audit and security aligned to the Digital Personal Data Protection regime and to recognised AI-application standards. A relational knowledge graph and agentic, multi-source orchestration deepen multi-step reasoning and the build can be staged â€” a citation-grounded retrieval MVP first, then the graph and agentic layers, then paid-source connectors and the full multilingual and voice experience. The output should be evaluable on answer accuracy, citation correctness, safe abstention on out-of-scope or uncertain queries and multilingual quality.