Maharashtra Clears ₹11.26 Cr Sarvam AI Deployment For Govt Departments

The Maharashtra government has granted approval for the deployment of sovereign artificial intelligence solutions from Sarvam AI for government departments with a two-year outlay of ₹11.26 crore.

The package covers the deployment of Indus, a sovereign AI workspace for around 2,500 state government users at an "indicative" first-year cost of ₹5.63 crore and a two-year outlay of ₹11.26 crore, said a Government Resolution (GR).

The proposal was cleared by a High-Power Committee headed by the chief secretary.

According to the GR, Sarvam AI has proposed sovereign AI solutions hosted entirely on secure and audited infrastructure within India, ensuring that no government data leaves the country. Besides Indus, the package included Samvaad, voice and WhatsApp-based citizen outreach agents; and Saaras and Bulbul speech models for integration into the state's MahaAI platform.

The Indus platform will provide drafting and file noting assistance, RTI response generation, document intelligence, optical character recognition (OCR) across Indian scripts, multilingual interaction in 22 languages including Marathi, project workspaces, data analysis and integration with eOffice and NIC e-mail wherever API access is available.

The commercial structure includes a Foundation Partner subscription rate of ₹1,200 per user per month for the first 12 months, compared with the standard rate of ₹2,500 per user per month. It also includes a one-time professional services fee of ₹50 lakh, setup and adoption manpower costing ₹42 lakh for three months and an annual platform maintenance fee of ₹25 lakh.

The committee also approved Track Two department transformation engagements starting at ₹50 lakh per engagement and on-demand Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs) at ₹7 lakh per engineer per month. It additionally cleared the deployment of two FDEs beyond the initial three-month period until December at the same rate, excluding taxes.

The GR further approved a one-month pilot of the Samvaad AI agent for tuberculosis awareness. The software will make outreach calls to TB patients in local languages and analyse call quality. The pilot carries a one-time agent development charge of ₹6 lakh and a usage charge of ₹3 per minute.

It also approved the integration of Saaras, a speech recognition model, and Bulbul, a text-to-speech model, into the MahaAI platform for four months on a usage-based, no-commitment basis. The department will pay API usage charges of ₹0.50 per minute for Saaras and ₹30 per 10,000 characters for Bulbul, excluding GST.

The Electronics, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence Department will bear the expenditure, while the Commissionerate of Electronics, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence has been authorised to implement the project in accordance with the prescribed terms and conditions, the GR said.