The government has identified 20 indigenous sovereign AI model proposals for support under the IndiaAI Mission, including 12 large language models and eight small language models. Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw informed the Lok Sabha that the mission is supporting Indian startups and institutions to develop domestic AI models while creating economic opportunities, employment pathways and risk-management capacity around artificial intelligence.
The disclosed proposal pipeline includes models from Sarvam AI, Gnani.AI, BharatGen and Avataar AI. The government said supported work includes Sarvam AI’s 30-billion-parameter and 105-billion-parameter models, Gnani.AI’s speech-to-speech model, BharatGen’s multilingual foundation models and Avataar AI’s video-generation model. Domain-specific small language models and AI frameworks are also under development across healthcare, language technologies and agentic AI systems.
The update gives a clearer view of the IndiaAI Mission’s operating progress beyond headline allocations. The government said 15 compute service providers have been empanelled, 237 projects have been supported and 93.18 lakh GPU hours have been sanctioned for AI research and development. It also said 12 national-level hackathons and innovation challenges have supported 62 AI prototypes and the deployment of 20 AI-based solutions.
Talent and institutional capacity are also part of the mission’s disclosed progress. Vaishnaw told Parliament that 686 fellowships have been awarded across undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes in 178 institutions. The YUVA AI for All programme has been completed by more than 26.5 lakh individuals. The government has established 27 India Data and AI Labs, which have trained more than 2,500 students, and work is underway to establish 188 additional labs.
The AI infrastructure and talent components are important because sovereign model development requires more than model training announcements. It depends on compute access, datasets, evaluation capacity, domain expertise, language coverage, safety frameworks and deployment pathways. The government has also approved a scheme to establish 58 AI Centres of Excellence across states and Union Territories in collaboration with state governments and industry partners.
Vaishnaw said India’s AI strategy builds on a technology sector with annual revenue of about $300 billion and a workforce of 60 lakh people. The government also linked the mission to national AI governance, citing guidelines released on November 5, 2025, as the framework for safe, responsible and inclusive AI development and deployment. The latest disclosure positions IndiaAI as a more structured programme spanning models, applications, datasets, compute, talent development and governance rather than a single foundation-model initiative.
