Parliament Question: Indigenous Development of AI Models

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LOK SABHA UNSTARRED QUESTION NO. 5334 TO BE ANSWERED ON: 25.03.2026 INDIGENOUS DEVELOPMENT OF AI MODELS 5334. SHRI MANISH TEWARI: Will the Minister of ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY be pleased to state: (a) whether Government has taken note of concerns that India risks remaining primarily a consumer of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies rather than emerging as a global creator and developer of foundational AI models and technologies; (b) the steps taken by the Government under the IndiaAI Mission and other initiatives to promote indigenous development of AI models, compute infrastructure, datasets and research capabilities within the country; (c) whether the Government has undertaken any assessment of India’s current capacity in terms of AI research talent, semiconductor and compute infrastructure and availability of high-quality datasets required for building large-scale AI systems; (d) the measures being taken to encourage startups, academic institutions and industry to develop foundational AI technologies and reduce dependence on foreign AI platforms; and (e) whether the Government proposes to introduce any policy incentives, funding mechanisms or public-private partnerships to strengthen India’s position as a producer and innovator in the global AI ecosystem? ANSWER MINISTER OF STATE FOR ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (SHRI JITIN PRASADA) (a) to (e): 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. IndiaAI Mission: In 2024, Government launched IndiaAI Mission to establish a robust and inclusive AI ecosystem that aligns with the country’s development goals. India AI mission is driven by a vision to position India as a global leader in artificial intelligence by focusing on seven foundational pillars. Development of the India’s Foundational ModelGovernment is supporting twelve organisations and consortia to develop sovereign foundational model. These include Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, Gan AI, Avatar AI, IIT Bombay Consortium (BharatGen), GenLoop, Zentieq, Intellihealth, Shodh AI, Fractal Analytics Ltd. and Tech Mahindra Maker’s Lab. Financial assistance is being provided in calibrated manner to cover compute usage costs. 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. This will fuel innovation across India’s startup and research community. 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 Government is offering GPU access at subsidized rates to Indian start-ups and academia. As on date, 38,231 GPUs have been onboarded from 14 empaneled service providers under the IndiaAI Compute Capacity framework Government of India provides access to these GPUs at subsidized rates. The average rate is approximately Rs 65 per GPU per hour, except for select high-end GPUs Apart from compute, empanelled providers are delivering storage, networking, AI platforms and other supporting services necessary for AI model development and deployment Promoting Indian start-ups to get global opportunities: The IndiaAI Startups Global program was launched in collaboration with Station F (Paris) and HEC Paris. Under this program, 10 Indian AI startups have been selected and supported to expand into the European market. Details are at Annexure-I. It supports Indian AI startups in accessing global innovation ecosystems and expanding into international markets. These startups are already developing innovative solutions across sectors such as governance, smart cities, document intelligence, and enterprise automation. Their work highlights the growing maturity of India’s AI startup ecosystem and its ability to build practical, deployment-ready solutions. Development of AI Applications:Further, under the IndiaAI Mission, thirty (30) applications have been selected focusing on India- specific problems. These applications belong to critical sectors notably agriculture, health, climate change and natural disaster. Collaboration with other departments/ministries: Sector-specific hackathons and innovation challenges have also been organised with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), the Geological Survey of India, Ministry of Ayush, Ministry of MSME, NFRA and National Cancer Grid (NCG) to further encourage focused AI solution development. From these hackathons and innovation challenges, 10 startups have been identified for scaling up the solutions. AI Centre of Excellence Government is establishing Artificial Intelligence Centres of Excellence (AI-CoEs) across States and Union Territories in a collaborative model State/UTs and Industry Partners. These CoEs aims to nurture skilled professionals through targeted talent development programs in emerging tech domains. In addition, 7 Centres of Excellence have been established in emerging technology domain including Gaming/ VFX, AR/VR, Blockchain, IoT at different geographical locations. Responsible and safe AI: Various initiatives have been taken to promote responsible and ethical AI across multiple sectors especially on governance and education. Details are as follows: • Establishment of IndiaAI Safety Institute for AI safety, security, and developing trust with diverse stakeholders. • Diverse stakeholders including academia, startups, industry & government bodies engage through a hub-and-spoke model. • 13 Responsible AI Projects are underway covering Machine Unlearning, AI Bias Mitigation, Privacy-Enhancing Tools, AI Governance Testing, etc. Strengthening AI research ecosystem in India Government is developing an extensive AI talent and research pipeline by supporting 500 PhD fellows, 5,000 postgraduates and 8,000 undergraduates. 27 IndiaAI Data and AI Labs have been established in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities through NIELIT to conduct coursework in AI, data curation, annotation, cleaning and applied data science 543 ITIs and Polytechnics across all States/UTs have been approved to set up additional IndiaAI Data and AI Labs More than 250 fellowships have already been awarded under the programme to promote high- quality research in Artificial Intelligence****** Annexure-I The final list of 10 Startups for the IndiaAI Startups Global Program - Paris: Sr. No. Startup Name Area of Work 1 PrivaSapien Responsible AI with privacy engineering and privacy- Technologies enhancing technologies 2 CoRover.ai Conversational Gen AI platform for contextual, domain-specific human-like responses 3 Staqu Technologies AI-powered audio-video analytics for surveillance, (Jarvis) security, and governance 4 SatSure Analytics Earth Observation using satellite imagery and AI for decision intelligence 5 Storyvord AI-based video content generation from product URLs and brand context 6 VolarAlta Drone-based AI solutions for industrial inspections 7 Smartail AI-powered edtech platform for immersive learning and real-time assessment 8 Secure Blink AI-driven cybersecurity with proactive DevSecOps posture management 9 NeuroPixel.AI AI-enabled ultra-fast image editing for fashion and e- commerce 10 Voicing AI Agentic AI platform for enterprise-grade intelligent voice agents *******