Lok Sabha Question No. 5417 (UNSTARRED), answered on 2026-03-25
Subject: Small Language Models
Ministry: ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Asked by: Shri B K Parthasarathi

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

## LOK SABHA UNSTARRED QUESTION NO. 5417

TO BE ANSWERED ON: 25.03.2026

## SMALL LANGUAGE MODELS

## 5417. SHRI B K PARTHASARATHI:

Will the Minister of ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY be pleased to state:

- (a) the details of the amount invested by the Government for the promotion of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the country during the last three years, year-wise;
- (b) the number of startups supported by the Government for the development of SLMs along with the financial assistance provided to each company, State-wise;
- (c) the details of the list of SLM project being developed along with the key sectors being targeted; and
- (d) the timeline by which the supported startups aim to complete preliminary data training and initiate user applications?

## ANSWER

## MINISTER OF STATE FOR ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (SHRI JITIN PRASADA)

(a) to (d): 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 Model

Government 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.

The details of selected organisations and support extended are placed at Annexure I

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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.

## Support extended to the Organizations selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) Pillar

| S.   | Name of      | Compute Support   | Non-Compute Cost   | Total Cost (Cr)   |
|------|--------------|-------------------|--------------------|-------------------|
| No.  | Organization | Worth (Cr)        | (Cr)               |                   |

|   1 | Sarvam        | ₹246.72   | ₹0.00   | 246.72   |
|-----|---------------|-----------|---------|----------|
|   2 | Gnani         | ₹177.27   | ₹0.00   | 177.27   |
|   3 | Gan AI        | ₹88.02    | ₹22.01  | 110.03   |
|   4 | Soket AI      | ₹162.47   | ₹14.61  | 177.08   |
|   5 | Avataar AI    | ₹12.88    | ₹3.22   | 16.10    |
|   6 | Bharatgen     | ₹990.92   | ₹67.60  | 1,058.52 |
|   7 | Fractal       | ₹137.91   | ₹0.00   | 137.91   |
|   8 | Tech Mahindra | ₹2.66     | ₹0.00   | 2.66     |
|   9 | Zenteiq       | ₹165.19   | ₹41.30  | 206.49   |
|  10 | Genloop       | ₹2.09     | ₹0.52   | 2.61     |
|  11 | Intellihealth | ₹41.50    | ₹8.00   | 49.50    |
|  12 | Shodh AI      | ₹7.52     | ₹1.88   | 9.40     |

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