Parliament Question: India AI Mission

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LOK SABHA STARRED QUESTION NO. *50 TO BE ANSWERED ON: 22.07.2026 INDIA AI MISSION *50: SHRI AVIMANYU SETHI: SHRI CHANDRA PRAKASH JOSHI: Will the Minister of ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY be pleased to state: (a) the details of progress made under the India AI Mission till May 2026 including the initiatives launched pursuant to the India AI Governance Guidelines; (b) the present status of development of indigenous AI foundation models, common compute infrastructure and AI datasets under the Mission; (c) the details of measures taken by the Government to promote adoption of Artificial Intelligence by startups, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and academic and technical institutions particularly in Meerut and Hapur in Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh particularly in Shimla Lok Sabha Constituency, Nabarangpur Lok Sabha Constituency of Odisha, Dakshin Kannada, Maharashtra particularly Jalgaon Lok Sabha Constituency to generate employment opportunities for the youth thereunder; (d) whether any proposal for data centre in Dakshina Kannada is pending with the Government and if so, the details thereof; (e) whether the Government proposes to establish AI innovation, skilling and research facilities in Maharashtra particularly in Jalgaon Lok Sabha Constituency and if so, the details thereof; (f) the details of safeguards put in place to ensure responsible, transparent, secure and ethical deployment of artificial intelligence technologies along with the roadmap for implementation of the Mission; and (g) the steps taken to strengthen India’s global leadership in Artificial Intelligence and extend the benefits of India AI Mission to remote and aspirational regions including Nabarangpur Lok Sabha Constituency? ANSWER MINISTER OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (SHRI ASHWINI VAISHNAW) (a) to (g): A Statement is laid on the Table of the House.STATEMENT REFERRED TO IN THE REPLY TO LOK SABHA STARRED QUESTION NO. *50 FOR 22.07.2026 REGARDING “INDIA AI MISSION” ****** (a) to (c): IndiaAI Mission: India’s AI policy is based on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of democratizing technology. It is aimed at creating economic opportunities and employment for youth, while addressing risks associated with AI. India’s AI strategy builds on India’s vibrant IT sector with annual revenue of 300 billion dollars and 60 Lakh strong workforce. India AI Mission has seven pillars including development of AI models, applications, datasets, talent development and affordable compute. Progress under IndiaAI mission till date: AI models: The Government of India is supporting Indian startups and institutions to develop large language models. 20 indigenous sovereign model proposals have been identified for support, comprising 12 LLMs and 8 SLMs. Notable successes so far include: • Sarvam AI’s Sarvam 30 billion parameter and 105 billion parameter models • Gnani.AI’s speech-to-speech model • BharatGen’s multilingual foundation models • Avataar AI’s video generation model Domain-specific SLMs, include specialized models and AI frameworks addressing healthcare, language technologies and agentic AI systems are at various stages of development and deployment. Affordable compute: • Compute service providers empanelled: 15 • Number of projects supported: 237 • GPU hours sanctioned: 93.18 lakh GPU hours Application Development: • 12 National-level Hackathons/Innovation Challenges launched. • Supported the development of 62 AI prototypes and deployment of 20 AI based solutions. Talent development: • 686 fellowships have been awarded across undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes in 178 institutions. • YUVA AI for All programme has been completed by over 26.5 lakh individuals. IndiaAI labs: • 27 India Data and AI Labs have been established, which has supported training for more than 2500 students • Work ongoing on additional 188 labs.AI Centres of Excellence: Government has also approved a scheme for the establishment of 58 Artificial Intelligence Centres of Excellence (AI-CoEs) across States and Union Territories, in collaboration with the respective State/UT Governments and industry partners. India AI Governance Guidelines: India AI Governance Guidelines were released on 5th November 2025, providing a comprehensive national framework for the safe, responsible and inclusive development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence in the country. Pursuant to the Guidelines, the following institutional mechanisms have been initiated: • AI Governance and Economic Group (AIGEG), a high-level inter-ministerial body to steer the development of India’s national AI governance strategy; • Technology and Policy Expert Committee (TPEC), to support technical and policy recommendations; and • AI Safety Institute (AISI), to undertake safety research, develop standards, test AI systems and evaluate emerging risks. India AI Impact summit: Further, India hosted the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 from 16th – 21st February 2026 at New Delhi, the first edition of the global AI summit series to be held in the Global South, which concluded as a historic global convergence establishing India as a global hub for artificial intelligence innovation, governance, partnership and inclusive growth. The IndiaAI Mission provides affordable AI compute access through empaneled cloud service providers. Access is available across the country, irrespective of location. Eligible end users can apply for AI compute resources from any part of India. People have accessed compute from many locations like Meerut and Hapur (Uttar Pradesh), Shimla Parliamentary Constituency (Himachal Pradesh), Nabarangpur Parliamentary Constituency (Odisha), Dakshina Kannada (Karnataka) and Jalgaon Lok Sabha Constituency (Maharashtra). AI Data labs have been established by NIELIT. For instance, at NIELIT Centre, Shimla (Himachal Pradesh), a total of 261 students have registered under the IndiaAI FutureSkills programme for the two foundational courses. Of these, 187 students have completed the training (88 in Data Annotation and 99 in Data Curation), 247 students have appeared for the examination (115 for Data Annotation and 132 for Data Curation), and 54 students have been certified (22 in Data Annotation and 32 in Data Curation). An additional 67 students are currently undergoing training across the two courses at the Shimla Centre. (d): Presently, no proposal for an AI Data Centre in Dakshina Kannada is pending with the IndiaAI Mission. (e): The following initiatives are under implementation in the State of Maharashtra: • AI Centres of Excellence (CoEs): The Government has approved a scheme for the establishment of 58 Artificial Intelligence Centres of Excellence (AI-CoEs) across States and Union Territories, in collaboration with the respective State/UT Governments and industry partners. Under the approved framework, Maharashtra has been assigned three (3) Artificial Intelligence Centres of Excellence (AI-CoEs). These three Centres ofExcellence are being established in Navi Mumbai (anchored by CIDCO), Pune (anchored by MahaIT), and Nagpur (anchored by MRSAC). • IndiaAI Fellowships: 41 Fellows from Maharashtra are supported across 16 participating institutions. • Data and AI Labs: 33 IndiaAI Data and AI Labs have been sanctioned in Maharashtra under the Tier 2 and Tier 3 rollout. The NIELIT Lab at Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar is operational, with 122 students registered since September 2025 across courses on Data Annotation using Python and Data Curation using Python. Of these, 40 have been trained and 38 have been certified. • Sovereign Foundation Models: Maharashtra-based institutions and enterprises are contributing to the development of sovereign foundation models. These include BharatGen, an IIT Bombay-led consortium developing multilingual and multimodal models such as Param2 17B, Patram 7B and Shrutam 2, with a roadmap towards trillion- parameter scale. Tech Mahindra in Pune is developing a sovereign large language model building on Project Indus. Fractal Analytics in Mumbai is developing an indigenous foundation model under the Mission. • Startups under international acceleration: Two Maharashtra-based AI startups, Daten and Wissen Pvt. Ltd. in Mumbai and Infiheal Healthtech Pvt. Ltd. in Mumbai, have been supported under Cohort 2 of the international acceleration programme at Station F in Paris and HEC Paris. • Safe and Trusted AI project: Under the Safe and Trusted AI pillar, the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology in Pune, in partnership with Mindgraph, has been selected to develop Explainable AI tools for security applications. • Emerging State-level collaboration: The Mission is exploring collaboration with the Government of Maharashtra for MahaVISTAAR AI, an AI-powered digital platform for farmers, and for the development of domain-focused Small Language Models covering Marathi and its dialects, agricultural advisory, and health advisory. (f): Government is cognizant of the risks associated with adoption of Artificial Intelligence and has taken the following steps to ensure safe, responsible and transparent AI deployment: • Under the ‘Safe & Trusted AI’ Pillar of the IndiaAI Mission, 13 responsible AI projects have been selected covering bias mitigation, explainability, privacy-preserving AI, algorithm auditing, deepfake detection, AI forensics, risk assessment and generative AI security, including Saakshya, a multi-agent framework for deepfake detection, and AI Vishleshak, an audio-visual forgery detection system. • The IndiaAI Safety Institute has been established for AI safety, security and developing trust with diverse stakeholders, engaging academia, startups, industry and Government bodies through a hub-and-spoke model. • The India AI Governance Guidelines lay down a risk-based governance framework addressing algorithmic bias, misinformation, deepfakes and unintended societal harm, and propose institutional mechanisms including the AI Governance and Economic Group (AIGEG), Technology and Policy Expert Committee (TPEC) and AI Safety Institute (AISI) for oversight, standards and safety research. • The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 provides a legal framework for privacy and protection of personal data used in AI applications. • The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued advisories on safety measures against adversarial AI threats (May 2023) and best practices for responsible use of Generative AI (March 2025), besides launching the CertifiedSecurity Professional in Artificial Intelligence (CSPAI) programme with SISA in September 2024. (g): Global dialogue India hosted the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi from 16th to 21st February 2026. • Over 100 countries participated, including 22 Heads of State/Government. • The India AI Impact Summit Declaration was endorsed by 92 countries and international organizations. • The New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments were signed by 13 leading model providers. • India joined the Pax Silica coalition to secure the global silicon supply chain. • India signed a Statement of Intent with Sweden on bilateral AI cooperation. • As founder Chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), India has continued to play a significant role in shaping global norms on the development, usage, and safety of AI. Reaching remote and aspirational regions Benefits of the IndiaAI Mission are being extended to the State of Odisha: • AI compute resources are available on an equitable, location-agnostic basis. • One IndiaAI Data & AI Lab has been operationalized at the NIELIT Centre, Bhubaneswar, delivering foundational courses in Data Annotation and Data Curation. A total of 374 students have registered under the IndiaAI FutureSkills programme for the two foundational courses at the Bhubaneswar Centre — 185 for the Fundamentals of Data Annotation using Python course and 189 for the Fundamentals of Data Curation using Python course. Of these, 199 students have completed the training (60 in Data Annotation and 139 in Data Curation), 371 students have appeared for the examination (184 for Data Annotation and 187 for Data Curation). An additional 175 students are currently undergoing training across the two courses at the Bhubaneswar Centre. • A total of 8 fellowships have been awarded to students from Odisha across undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes under the IndiaAI FutureSkills pillar— comprising 4 Undergraduate fellowships, 1 Postgraduate fellowship and 3 PhD Research Fellowships—supporting AI research and skilling in the State's academic institutions. *******