India Launches AI Mission to Build Sovereign LLMs

IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the expansion of the IndiaAI Mission on September 18, 2025, detailing a Rs 10,300-crore investment to build sovereign artificial intelligence capabilities. The initiative includes the establishment of over 500 data labs nationwide to enhance infrastructure and talent. Vaishnaw also stated that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser will launch a new AI framework within 10 days.

As part of this mission, the government selected eight partners to develop large language models (LLMs), including Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics, and the BharatGen consortium. The BharatGen project, anchored at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and supported by the Department of Science and Technology, received Rs 988.6 crore to develop an LLM with 1 trillion parameters. This project aims to create AI solutions across 22 Indian languages to ensure cultural representation.

BharatGen Executive Vice President Rishi Bal noted that the funding helps overcome computational bottlenecks and allows for the development of sector-specific models for law, finance, governance, and agriculture. One current application, Krishi Saathi, already provides farmers with voice-enabled assistance via WhatsApp. To support these goals, the government is seeking to add 10,000 GPUs to its existing stock of 34,000 and is developing small language models for weather forecasting, manufacturing, and logistics.