Why doesn't India make its own superconducting MRI magnets?

As of 2024, virtually every superconducting MRI magnet used in India is imported. The country buys roughly ₹1,800 crore of MRI scanners each year, and by the IMRI project's own account, there is no manufacturer of MRI magnet systems in India at present. The scarcity shows in the numbers: India has about 1.5 to 2 MRI machines per million people, against 10 to 30 per million in developed countries.

The magnet is the hard part. An MRI needs a strong, stable magnetic field, and it produces that with coils of niobium-titanium wire cooled to about -269°C in liquid helium. At that temperature the wire loses all electrical resistance and can carry enormous currents without overheating. Building this means marrying superconducting materials, cryogenic engineering and precision winding into a single reliable machine — which is why only a handful of companies across five countries (China, Japan, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom) make the entire MRI ecosystem.

India is climbing toward that league. The government-funded IMRI project, launched in 2014 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, split the work three ways: the Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) designed the 1.5 Tesla superconducting magnet, SAMEER built the radio-frequency imaging hardware, and C-DAC developed the software. The assembled machine was expected at AIIMS-Delhi around October 2025 for clinical validation. On the cryogenics side, INOXCVA completed fabrication in April 2023 of what it describes as India's first indigenously designed, zero-boil-off 4K helium cryostat for a whole-body 1.5T magnet, at its Vadodara plant. Separately, Bengaluru startup Voxelgrids Innovations, founded in 2017, built a 1.5T scanner using a helium-free, conduction-cooled magnet — no liquid-helium bath at all.

But demonstrated is not manufactured. SAMEER director general Dr Hanumantha Rao draws the distinction plainly: assembling imported components is not the same as design-and-build, and "nobody in the country makes magnets" from scratch. He maintains SAMEER and IUAC designed and built their own magnet and cryogenic system in-house — yet he also disputes that Voxelgrids' magnet is built entirely domestically. Paras Defence & Space Technologies has been named to manufacture the critical magnets under the SAMEER-led consortium, but at announcement, production at its Ambernath facility was only scheduled to begin in the next financial year, not yet underway. These remain single delivered units and prototypes, not a production line.

The gap persists in the supply chain beneath the magnet. Even in India's most indigenous efforts, project scientists estimate 90-95% of the system is domestic — with the superconducting wire itself among the few components still imported. That wire is the core conductor wound into the coils, and there is no domestic source for it. Liquid helium, the coolant that holds the coils at 4.2K, is likewise not produced at scale in India, which is part of why the helium-free approach is being pursued. Regulatory clearance through CDSCO for medical devices is still emerging for these machines. The engineering has been shown to work; the industrial base to repeat it has not yet formed.

What it would take is visible in what already exists. The design capability is demonstrated across IUAC, SAMEER and C-DAC; the cryostat is proven at INOXCVA; a named magnet manufacturer is standing up a line at Paras. Closing the remaining gap means securing the imported inputs — chiefly niobium-titanium wire — either through domestic production or a reliable supply, moving a prototype magnet into repeatable manufacture, and carrying the AIIMS-Delhi unit through certification. An imported 1.5T or 3T machine costs ₹8-15 crore before installation; indigenous versions are projected to cut manufacturing cost by around 40%. The prize is not merely price. It is joining the five nations that can build the whole thing.