Gaurav Shah, CEO, ARMMAN with the Changemaker- Digital Transformation award.
| Photo Credit:
BIJOY GHOSH
ARMAAN (Advancing Reduction In Mortality and Morbidity of Mothers, Children And Neonates) that has saved millions of women through WhatsApp and chatbots, has won the businessline Changemaker Awards for the Digital transformation category.
Started by Dr. Arpana Hegde, ARMAAN has built its Integrated High-Risk Pregnancy Tracking Management (IHRPTM) programme that works with health workers and doctors to identify and manage high-risk conditions among pregnant women.
Solutions were built on the government’s primary health resources already available in the country like ASHA or community health workers who had mobile phones. So, they were sent information and trained to diagnose risk factors in time and bring them into the primary care referral pathway – so that only complicated cases went to tertiary hospitals.
The organisation is looking to build scalable and cost effective solutions and intends to further innovate—using Artificial Intelligence (AI), partnerships and mobile technology—to deliver personalised, preventive care at scale.
Receiving the businessline Changemaker award, Gaurav Shah, Chief Executive Officer, Armman, said, “Thirty-million pregnancies happen every year in India and of that one-third are high risk conditions…We adopt a unique ‘tech plus touch’ model that combines the deep mobile phone penetration and existing infrastructure of government and NGO partners to inform women and to train health workers, in 27 States and Union Territories of India.”
He further said that through the businessline Changemaker Awards, the organisation hopes to see more such initiatives coming from other startups too so that more and more women can be saved.
He also added that when Armman ran the Central government programme called Kilkari through 28 States, they reached nearly 80-million women. The Central Kilkari programme is ending, because it was IVR-based, but the company was hoping that it would take on a new life with multimedia.
The Mamitra service with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) involves hand-holding through WhatsApp-based solutions, with a greater focus on high-risk women and children. And among high-risk children, the effort is to focus on “malnourished children much earlier in the development stage.
Published on September 22, 2026
