Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used to document clinical encounters, yet its reliability in multilingual and demographically diverse Indian healthcare context remains largely unknown. In this study, we first conduct the systematic audit of ASR performance on real-world psychiatric interview data spanning Kannada, Hindi and Indian English, comparing eight state-of-the-art models including IndicWhisper, WhisperLargeV3, Sarvam, GoogleS2T, Gemma3n, OmniLingual, Vaani, and Gemini. Our results reveal substantial variability across models and languages, with some systems performing competitively in Indian English but failing in regional speech. We further fine-tune two of the best performing opensource models, i.e., Gemma3n and OmniLingual, using various methods. With this, we uncover systematic performance gaps tied to speaker role and gender, raising concerns about equitable deployment in clinical settings, which are further mitigated by fairness-aware fine-tuning. To this end, we propose SamaVaani, a unified debiasing technique that simultaneously improves ASR performance and improves fairness across demographic groups.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in non-English clinical settings is challenged by multiscript variability, where the same term may appear in multiple valid orthographic forms. Conventional string-matching evaluation metrics often underestimate ASR performance by treating orthographic variants as errors. To address this issue, we introduce MultiClin, a clinical ASR benchmark designed to evaluate robustness to multiscript variability. Experiments across diverse ASR models show that multiscript-aware evaluation provides a fairer assessment of recognition quality than conventional single-reference evaluation. We further investigate the impact of script consistency during training and find that inconsistent script mappings increase orthographic uncertainty and hinder model convergence, with a balanced 50% mapping ratio producing the highest entropy. In contrast, script unification consistently yields the best ASR performance. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/aitrics-ronaldo/Interspeech_MultiClin.