New Delhi: The government is preparing to expand its Rs 1,500 crore IndiaAI Mission by selecting around eight additional firms to build foundational artificial intelligence models. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw is expected to announce the second-round beneficiaries next week, according to officials familiar with the matter.
The IndiaAI Mission, launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is designed to support the development of indigenous AI capabilities through grants, subsidised GPU compute and access to a shared cloud-based facility. The programme aims to address one of the sector’s biggest challenges, limited GPU supply which continues to affect the scaling of AI projects in India.
Among the expected beneficiaries in this round is BharatGen, a government-backed consortium anchored by IIT Bombay. The consortium recently released Param-1, a bilingual foundation model with 2.9 billion parameters trained on large English–Hindi corpora. Its inclusion would mark one of the early efforts to build large-scale Indian language models under public support.
This development follows the first round of approvals earlier this year, when firms including Sarvam, Soket Labs, Gnani.ai and Gan.ai were selected to receive assistance. The mission had attracted hundreds of applications, reflecting the growing interest in India’s AI ecosystem. By expanding the list of beneficiaries, officials say the government seeks to ensure a broader base of organisations working on indigenous AI models.
The mission’s design includes a centralised compute facility where cloud and GPU-as-a-service providers have been empaneled to supply GPU hours at subsidised rates. Policymakers have positioned this facility as a way to democratise access for startups, academic researchers and public institutions, making it less expensive to experiment and build large-scale models.
