Parliament Question: Development of AI technology on foreign systems

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RAJYA SABHA UNSTARRED QUESTION NO. 3887 TO BE ANSWERED ON: 27.03.2026 DEVELOPMENT OF AI TECHNOLOGY ON FOREIGN SYSTEMS 3887 #. SHRI RAMJI LAL SUMAN: Will the Minister of ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY be pleased to state: (a) whether it is a fact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is being developed on a foreign system in the country; (b) if so, the views of experts on the risks of relying on AI based on a foreign technological system; and (c) Government's roadmap for tackling the risks posed by AI operating on foreign technological system? ANSWER MINISTER OF STATE FOR ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (SHRI JITIN PRASADA) (a) to (c): India’s AI strategy is based on the Hon’ble Prime Minister's vision to democratize the use of technology. It aims to address India centric challenges, create economic and employment opportunities for all Indians. The focus is on ensuring that benefits of AI reach all section of society. At the same time, Government is also cognizant of the risks associated with AI systems operating on foreign technological platforms such as concerns related to data security, algorithmic opacity, systemic bias, misinformation and national security. To address these risks, the Government has adopted a multi-pronged and calibrated roadmap under the IndiaAI Mission. The mission focuses on building the technological sovereignty, and also safety and trust in AI systems. IndiaAI Mission Government approved the IndiaAI Mission on 7th March 2024. It establishes a robust and inclusive AI ecosystem aligned with India’s development goals. The key pillars of mission include democratising access to compute, improving data availability and quality, developing indigenous AI models, strengthening talent and skilling, promoting industry partnerships and startups, supporting socially relevant AI applications, and ensuring ethical and responsible AI.These efforts reflect the Government’s focused approach to building a self-reliant, inclusive and globally competitive AI ecosystem. Development of the Indigenous Foundational Model The mission provides support to startups and researchers to developIndia’s own large multimodal models trained on Indian datasets and languages. Twelve organisations and consortia, including startups, industry players and academic institutions have been selected for developing Large and Small Language Models based on Indian datasets. Details in Annexure -I. Financial assistance is being provided to selected organizations to cover actual compute usage costs, while an additional 25% of the compute expenditure is being earmarked to support ancillary expenses such as datasets and personnel. Sovereign models of Sarvam AI, BharatGen and Gnani were launched during the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026. These models have shown strong performance on Indic language benchmarks, and in some cases perform better than leading frontier models on specific tasks The resulting AI models are expected to contribute to the open-source ecosystem by making them available through AIKosh platform for other startups and researchers. As part of the same, Sarvam and BharatGen models are now available on AIKosh platform for the developer community to develop AI based applications. Affordable Compute Capacity for AI Development Under IndiaAI Compute Capacity Pillar, a national AI compute capacity has been operationalized through empaneled AI service providers offering GPU access on cloud at subsidized rates to eligible users. • As on date, 38,231 GPUs have been onboarded from 14 empaneled service providers under the IndiaAI Compute Capacity framework • Access to these GPUs is provided at subsidized rates. The average rate is approximately Rs 65 per GPU per hour, except for select high-end GPUs • Empanelled providers are delivering storage, networking, AI platforms and other supporting services necessary for AI model development and deployment Safe & Trusted AI This pillar under the IndiaAI Mission seeks to balance innovation with strong governance frameworks to ensure responsible AI adoption. 13 projects have been selected addressing issues like machine unlearning, AI algorithm auditing tools, privacy-preserving machine learning, explainability, and evaluating gender bias in Agriculture LLMs etc. Details are placed at Annexure-II. E.g Bias mitigation is one such project that ensures that inputs of gender bias in training data is minimized.The Government has also launched the India AI Governance Guidelines, which lay down a human-centric, risk-based and techno-legal framework for the safe, responsible and accountable development and deployment of AI systems. The framework addresses risks related to bias, privacy, security, misinformation and misuse of AI, and is supported by institutional mechanisms such as the IndiaAI Safety Institute for technical evaluation and validation of AI systems Together, these measures reflect the Government’s roadmap to ensure that AI technologies used in India are safe, trusted, transparent and aligned with national priorities, while progressively strengthening indigenous capabilities and mitigating risks associated with dependence on foreign technological systems. ******* Annexure I The details of Twelve selected Organizations selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) Pillar 1. Sarvam AI - Developing an open source 120 billion parameter AI model to enhance governance and public service access through use cases like "2047: Citizen Connect" and "AI4Pragati". 2. Soket AI - Developing India's first open-source 120 billion parameter foundation model optimized for the country's linguistic diversity, targeting sectors such as defense, healthcare, and education. 3. Gnani AI - Building a 14 billion parameter Voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, real-time speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities. 4. Gan AI – Creating a 70 billion parameter multilingual foundation model targeting "Superhuman TTS(text-to-speech)" capabilities to surpass current global leaders. 5. Avatar AI – Creating specialized “AI Avatars” up to 70B parameters, optimized for Indian languages and domains such as agriculture, healthcare, and governance. 6. IIT Bombay Consortium – Bharat Gen – Developing multilingual and multimodal models ranging from 2B to 1T parameters, with an open-source approach to support applications in agriculture, finance, legal, health, and education. 7. Fractal Analytics Ltd. – Building India’s first large reasoning model of up to 70B parameters, designed for structured reasoning, STEM disciplines, and medical problem- solving. 8. Tech Mahindra Maker’s Lab – Designing an efficient 8B parameter model for Indic languages (with a focus on Hindi dialects), alongside an agentic AI platform, Orion, for government applications. 9. Zenteiq – Developing BrahmAI, a science-driven multimodal foundation model (8B–80B parameters) to advance engineering intelligence, scientific computing, and industrial innovation. 10. GenLoop – Creating small language models (2B parameters) – Yukti (Base), Varta (Instruction), and Kavach (Guard) – to support all 22 scheduled Indian languages with native reasoning and content moderation.11. Intellihealth – Proposing a 20B parameter model for EEG signal analysis to enable early screening of neurological disorders and advance brain–computer interface research. 12. Shodh AI – Developing a 7B parameter model for material discovery, integrating AI into experimental workflows to accelerate innovation in material sciences.Annexure-II The details of the selected projects under “Safe & Trusted AI” Pillar are as under: NAME OF SELECTED APPLICANT TITLE OF THE PROJECT THE THEME Machine IIT Jodhpur Machine Unlearning in Generative Unlearning Foundation Models Synthetic Data IIT Roorkee Design and Development of Method for Generation Generating Synthetic Data for Mitigating Bias in Datasets; and Framework for Mitigating Bias in Machine Learning Pipeline for Responsible AI AI Bias National Institute of Development of Responsible Artificial Mitigation Technology Raipur Intelligence for Bias Mitigation in Health Strategy Care Systems Explainable AI DIAT Pune and Mindgraph Enabling Explainable and Privacy Framework Technology Pvt. Ltd. Preserving AI for Security Privacy IIT Delhi, IIIT Delhi, IIT Robust Privacy-Preserving Machine Enhancing Dharwad and Learning Models Strategy Telecommunication Engineering Center (TEC) AI Ethical IIIT Delhi and Tools for assessing fairness of AI model Certification Telecommunication Framework Engineering Center (TEC) AI Algorithm Civic Data Labs ParakhAI - An open-source framework and Auditing Tool toolkit for Participatory Algorithmic Auditing AI Governance Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Track-LLM, Transparency, Risk Testing and Telecommunication Assessment, Context & Knowledge for Framework Engineering Center (TEC) Large Language Models Deepfake IIT Jodhpur (CI) & IIT Madras Saakshya: Multi-Agent, RAG-Enhanced Detection Tool Framework for Deepfake Detection and Governance IIT Mandi & Directorate of AI Vishleshak: Improving Audio-Visual Forensic Services, Himachal Deepfake Detection and Handwritten Pradesh Signature Forgery Detection with Adversarial Robustness, Explainability & Domain Generalization IIT Kharagpur Real-Time Voice Deepfake Detection SystemBias Mitigation Digital Futures Lab & Karya Evaluating Gender Bias in Agriculture LLMs- Creating Digital Public Goods (DPG) for Benchmarking and Fair Data Work Penetration Globals ITES Pvt Ltd & IIIT Anvil: Penetration Testing & Evaluation Testing & Dharwad Tool for LLM and Generative AI Evaluation *******