By Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula — Founder, Mynaa AI
Senior physician executive, medical educator
What Mynaa is, in one sentence
Mynaa is a doctor in the pocket of every Indian student — an always-on, multilingual, clinically-grounded mental-health layer for the schools, colleges, universities, medical colleges and coaching institutes of India, built around the Supreme Court of India's 2025 and 2026 directives and the protocols of NIMHANS.
That is the short answer. The longer answer is below, along with the question I get asked more than any other: why is it called Mynaa?
What Mynaa actually does
Mynaa is not a chatbot pretending to be a counsellor. It is a clinically-architected platform with five connected layers, each doing a specific job that the Indian education system has needed for a long time.
1. A 24/7 AI counsellor in 23 Indian languages. A student in distress can open Mynaa at 2 a.m. in a hostel in Kota, or in Imphal, or in a residency in a district hospital, and have an honest conversation in her own mother tongue — Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Assamese, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Urdu and more. Trained on cognitive-behavioural therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, motivational interviewing and other evidence-based modalities. Free of judgement. Available every minute of every day.
2. A suicide-prevention layer built on NIMHANS protocols. The Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) for risk assessment. Question, Persuade, Refer (QPR) gatekeeper training for hostel wardens, faculty and parents. Structured Safety Planning. Postvention support. Crisis-detection that escalates automatically to a human counsellor and, when required, to the institution's crisis team.
3. A clinical assessment and follow-up engine. PHQ-9 for depression. GAD-7 for anxiety. DASS-21 for the broader picture. With longitudinal tracking, so a counsellor sees not just today's score but the trajectory over weeks and months.
4. A compliance and reporting backbone for institutions. The Supreme Court of India's 2025 guidelines (I through XV) and 2026 directives now require every educational institution to demonstrate mental-health compliance. The NMC has mandated monthly Action Taken Reports for medical colleges. Mynaa generates these from the data the platform is already collecting — so good colleges stop drowning in paperwork while students suffer.
5. A flock — counsellor, psychiatrist, teacher, parent, ASHA worker. Mynaa connects the student to the counsellor, the counsellor to the psychiatrist, the school to the parent and the rural ASHA worker to the district hospital. Mental health is not an individual problem with an individual solution. It is a community holding each other up.
What Mynaa is not
I am a doctor. I trust human relationships. So let me be clear about what Mynaa is not.
Mynaa is not a replacement for a counsellor, a psychiatrist, a warden, a teacher or a parent. It is the layer underneath all of them — the one that catches a young person when no one else is in the room, and that hands her gently to a human being the moment she needs one.
Mynaa is also not a Western mental-health product translated into Hindi. It is built in India, by Indian clinicians, on Indian protocols, for the specific pressures of Indian education — the joint family, the entrance-exam culture, the language diversity, the rural-urban gap, the stigma, the silence.
Why we named it Mynaa
Once I knew what we were building, the name took longer than the architecture.
I did not want a clever English acronym. I did not want a Sanskrit word that only some Indians could pronounce. I did not want anything that sounded like a Silicon Valley import dressed up in a kurta. I wanted a name that any child in any village in India would already know.
I kept coming back to the Myna.
The Myna — Acridotheres tristis — is one of the most familiar birds in Indian life. It sits on our window sills. It appears in our folk songs and our grandmothers' stories. And the more I thought about her, the more I realised this small, brown, sharp-eyed bird was already living the life I wanted our app to live.
She speaks every language. The Myna is famous for her ability to mimic human speech across tongues — Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi. She does not insist that you speak hers. She learns yours. That is what mental health support in India must finally do. Mynaa speaks 23 Indian languages because no student should have to translate her own pain before she is allowed to ask for help.
She stays close. In Indian homes, the Myna has long been kept as a companion bird — the one that sits near you, listens, and chirps back. She is not a distant clinical observer. She is a friend on the windowsill. That is what I want our AI counsellor to feel like at 2 a.m. in a hostel room — not an institution, not a form to fill, but a presence.
She survives anywhere. The Myna lives in cities and in villages, in plains and in hills, in palaces and in slums. She adapts. She is not a delicate bird that needs ideal conditions. Our students are not in ideal conditions either. Mynaa is built to work in a top-tier urban university and in a rural ASHA worker's notebook on intermittent connectivity, on the same day, with the same care.
She is ours. The Myna is not a borrowed symbol. She belongs to India in a way that no eagle or owl ever will. I wanted our students to look at this name and feel that this thing was made for them, here, by someone who knows what it is to grow up in this country and to study under its particular pressures. Mental health in India cannot be a Western model dropped on Indian soil. It has to be grown from this soil. The Myna is from here. So are we.
She raises the alarm. When a Myna senses danger, she does not stay quiet. She calls — loud, sharp, repeated — and the entire flock takes notice. That is exactly what our suicide-prevention layer must do. Mynaa's crisis-detection and early-warning systems exist to make sure that when a young person is in danger, the people who can help — the counsellor, the teacher, the warden, the parent — know in time. Not three days later. Not at the funeral. In time.
She lives in a flock. Mynas do not survive alone, and neither do students. The Myna's flock looks out for its own. Mynaa is built the same way — connecting the student to the counsellor, the counsellor to the psychiatrist, the school to the parent, the rural ASHA worker to the district hospital. Mental health is not an individual problem with an individual solution. It is a community holding each other up. The bird taught me that before any textbook did.
By the end of those weeks of thinking about it, the name was no longer a choice. It was just the truth of what we were building, said in one word.
One more thing
Why I built a mental-health app is a longer story I have written separately. The short answer: during MBBS, I lost a close friend and a cousin to suicide. In the years since, I have watched too many bright, innocent students lose their lives to causes that, with timely help, could have been prevented. Mynaa is the help I wish we had then — built so that no family, no classmate, no teacher has to keep asking the question we asked: what did we miss? You can read the full story here:
— Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bondugula
Founder, Mynaa AI