Explained: How India’s ₹20,000 Crore AI Mission Could Be a Game Changer in the Country’s Global Tech Leadership

The Centre is looking to nearly double the outlay for the IndiaAI Mission to about ₹20,000 crore over the next five years, sources aware of the matter said. This comes at a time when the government is aiming to expand the programme’s scope to support more ambitious projects.

With the help of the expansion, the funding will be directed towards onboarding and subsidising additional Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), as well as bringing more startups and companies under the Mission umbrella to build indigenous foundational models, large language models, large reasoning models, and small language models, Business Standard reported.

How Money Flows Under the Mission?

The Cabinet had allocated ₹10,372 crore last year to catalyse various components under the Mission including pivotal initiatives like IndiaAI Compute Capacity, IndiaSI Innovation Centre, IndiaAI Datasets Platform, IndiaAI Application Development Initiative, IndiaAI FutureSkills, IndiaAI Startup Financing and Safe & Trusted AI. Through this, the government’s primary aim was to nurture the country’s AI innovation ecosystem through a public-private partnership model. 

Speaking to Business Standard, one of the sources said, “They are willing to put in additional budgets. They want to double it but in blocks, and talks for that are ongoing.” Adding to the same, another source stated, “Although the intention is to eventually double the corpus under the Mission, the exact timelines and amount of funds to be allocated have not yet been decided.” 

How India is Positioning for Global AI Leadership

As India seeks to tighten its grip in sovereign AI, the country as of now has selected four startups — Sarvam, SoketAI, Gan AI and Gnani AI to develop indigenous foundation models.

Sarvam AI has been asked to build the country’s first sovereign LLM ecosystem, 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”.  Besides that, SoketAI will develop India’s first open-source 120-billion-parameter foundation model optimised for the country’s linguistic diversity, thereby targeting sectors like defence, healthcare and education. 

On the other hand, Gnani AI will build a 14-billion-parameter voice AI foundation model delivering multilingual, realtime speech processing with advanced reasoning capabilities and Gan AI will create a 70-billion-parameter multilingual foundation model targeting text-to-speech capabilities. 

Earlier this year, India expanded its GPU capacity to nearly 40,000 from 18,417, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw noted. This expanded Cloud compute capacity is expected to provide a common computational AI platform for training and inference, which is important for developing indigenous foundation models and AI solutions tailored to the Indian context. 

A look at the current geopolitical scenario points out that there is consensus regarding India’s ambition to becoming more independent in every layer of the AI stack, one of the sources said, while talking about the Mission goals. 

What Hurdles Can India Face?

One of the sources cited above said that this move to increase the AI Mission’s corpus comes at a time when the government is in the process of giving contracts to build LLMs to eight more companies, including Tech Mahindra, Fractal, BharatGen, Genloop and four others.

However, as per wealth management firm Bernstein, there are concerns about the government’s AI initiative and there’s a risk of the programme becoming inconsequential on the global stage. 

The firm says that the “highly publicised government fund — spread thinly across a handful of startups building foundational models — barely registers globally”. It further warned that American organisations with deeper pockets and stronger infrastructure are likely to dominate AI like they did in earlier waves of technology.