Lok Sabha Question No. 6041 (UNSTARRED), answered on 2026-04-01
Subject: Proposals received for Indigenous AI Foundation Models
Ministry: ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Asked by: Shri Baijayant Panda

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

## LOK SABHA UNSTARRED QUESTION NO. 6041

TO BE ANSWERED ON: 01.04.2026

## PROPOSALS RECEIVED FOR INDIGENOUS AI FOUNDATION MODELS

## 6041. SHRI BAIJAYANT PANDA:

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

- (a) whether the IndiaAI Mission has attracted proposals for indigenous Artificial Intelligence (AI) foundation models;
- (b) the number of proposals received and entities selected; and
- (c) the manner in which AI compute and dataset initiatives are supporting startups and research institutions?

## 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.

India's  own  Foundational  Models  under  the  IndiaAI  Mission: Under  the  IndiaAI Foundation Models pillar, the Government of India is supporting Indian startups, consortia and institutions to develop large language models, multimodal models and domain-specific small language models.

The mission invited applications under the Foundation Models Pillar inviting applications from startups,  researchers  and  organisations  to  develop  state-of-the-art  foundational  AI  models trained on Indian datasets.

Out of 506 proposals received, 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.

The models are being developed based on Indian datasets spanning all 22 scheduled Indian languages. The selected projects cover multilingual foundational models, speech and voice models,  multimodal  AI,  scientific  models,  healthcare  reasoning  systems,  and  agentic  AI platforms.

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.

## Details of these organisations on Annexure -1.

Government  support  to  them  includes  access  to  compute,  datasets,  research  support  and ecosystem facilitation.

Models developed by Sarvam AI, BharatGen, Gnani and Socket were launched during the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026. These models represent important progress in building India's own AI capabilities tailored to local languages and use-cases.

Models developed by Sarvam AI have demonstrated relatively high accuracy in document understanding and Indic language processing. BharatGen, led by the IIT Bombay consortium, has developed Param2 AI model.

Sarvam  and  BharatGen  models  are  now  available  on  AIKosh  platform  for  the  developer community to develop AI based applications based on that.

## Affordable Compute Capacity for AI Development

Under  IndiaAI Compute  Capacity  Pillar, a national AI compute  capacity has been operationalized  through  empanelled  AI  service  providers  offering  GPU  access  on  cloud  at subsidized rates to eligible users.

This Common compute under IndiaAI Mission is available to startups, researchers, academic institutions and government organizations.

- More than 38,000 GPUs have been empanelled through 14 AI service providers to provide shared AI compute infrastructure
- Data  centres  located  across  the  country  including  Mumbai,  Navi  Mumbai,  Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Noida and Jamnagar are providing these services
- IndiaAI Compute Portal (https://compute.indiaai.gov.in) enables eligible users including researchers to discover and access GPU compute resources
- Access to these GPUs is provided at subsidized rates; 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

The compute capacity is being further expanded by adding 20,000 GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission (currently under process).

## AIKosha:

AIKosha is platform which provide access AI models, development tools and other resources. These belong to various fields such as health, agriculture, and education, with safeguards for data privacy.

Presently, AIKosh platform more than 280 models available for the use of researchers, startups and other stakeholders.

AIKosh  also  provides  a  secure  API-based  access,  an  AI  Sandbox  environment  for  model training and experimentation. It also provides AI Guardrails toolkits, which support developers in  monitoring,  evaluating  and  constraining  model  behaviour  during  development  and deployment.

The details and features of AIKosh can be accessed from https://aikosh.indiaai.gov.in/.

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## Proposals selected to build India's Foundation Models:

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  defence, 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 problemsolving.
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.

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