According to information by union minister for electronics and information technology (IT), railways, and information & broadcasting, the government has identified 20 indigenous sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) model proposals for support under the IndiaAI mission, comprising 12 large language models and eight small language models.
The minister mentioned that the IndiaAI Mission aims to create economic opportunities and employment while enabling the safe and responsible adoption of AI across the country. The selected proposals include Sarvam AI’s 30-billion and 105-billion parameter foundation models, Gnani.ai’s speech-to-speech model, BharatGen’s multilingual foundation models and Avataar AI’s video generation model. Several specialised AI models focused on healthcare, language technologies and agentic AI are also under development.
Further, the minister noted that India’s AI strategy builds on the country’s $300 billion IT sector, which employs nearly six million people. He noted that the IndiaAI mission comprises seven pillars covering AI model development, applications, datasets, talent development and affordable compute infrastructure.
To strengthen the AI ecosystem, the mission has empanelled 15 compute service providers, approved 237 projects and allocated 9.3 million graphics processing unit hours. The compute infrastructure is available nationwide to support startups, researchers and academic institutions.
According to the minister, the mission has also launched 12 national AI hackathons and innovation challenges, supported the development of 62 AI prototypes and enabled the deployment of 20 AI-based solutions.
On the skilling front, 27 India data and AI labs are operational and have trained more than 2,500 students, while another 188 labs are being established. In addition, 58 AI centres of excellence have been approved across states and union territories in collaboration with state governments and industry partners.
Furthermore, he added that the India AI governance guidelines, released on November 5, 2025, provides a national framework for the safe, responsible and inclusive development and deployment of AI. Under the mission’s safe and trusted AI pillar, 13 projects have been selected covering areas such as explainability, bias mitigation, privacy-preserving AI, algorithm auditing, deepfake detection, AI forensics, risk assessment and generative AI security.