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AI and robotics: technology and India's capability

Artificial intelligence and robotics as technology and as national capability: how large language models work, computing power and foundation models, uses in public life, robots, autonomous vehicles and drones. Prelims has asked how large language models work and what artificial intelligence can effectively do.

UPSC has asked

  • Prelims 2026: how Large Language Models work
  • Prelims 2020: what artificial intelligence can effectively do at present

All 3 subjects shown; the 3 that changed from 1 July to 15 September 2026 are marked.Show only these

BHASHINI

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Prelims and Mains

India's languages are the first problem any Indian artificial intelligence service has to solve, and BHASHINI (Bhasha Interface for India) is the platform built to solve it once for everybody. It is a layer other services call rather than a product a citizen opens, which is why its reach is counted in websites as well as languages.

  • BHASHINI runs under the Digital India Corporation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
  • BhashaDaan crowdsources speech, text and image data for it.
  • Shrutlekh uses natural language processing for real time translation and transcription.
  • BHASHINI Sangam, its international workshop, was held in Kathmandu on 1 September 2026 to widen work with Nepal.
  • Maharashtra discussed a proposed MahaBHASHINI at a workshop in the State secretariat on 10 September 2026.

36Indian text languages

23Indian voice languages

35international languages

800+government websites powered

From Press Information Bureau (PIB) releases, September 2026

What changed

  1. 10 Sep 2026

    PIB, 10 Sep 2026: Digital India BHASHINI Division Organises Workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya; Advances Multilingual AI for Inclusive Digital Governance (opens in a new tab)

  2. 1 Sep 2026

    PIB, 1 Sep 2026: Digital India BHASHINI Division Organises BHASHINI SANGAM Workshop in Nepal; Strengthens India–Nepal Collaboration on Multilingual AI (opens in a new tab)

  3. 14 Aug 2026

    • The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) released SraVaani, a speech recognition model covering 65 Indian languages and dialects.
    • Built with ARTPARK and Google, it is free and open source.
    • It reaches 20 scheduled languages and 45 regional languages and dialects, over 40 of them unsupported until now.
    • That is wider than the 23 Indian voice languages BHASHINI carries.

    The Hindu, 14 Aug 2026: First multilingual Indian speech recognition model trained on 65 languages and dialects released (opens in a new tab)

The Cyber-Physical Systems mission

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Prelims and Mains

The mission that funds India's work where software drives machinery is also where much of its artificial intelligence research sits. It does that spending through hubs rather than through its own departments.

  • The National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) was launched in 2018 for nine years and runs through 25 Technology Innovation Hubs.
  • Each hub is registered as a Section 8 company rather than run as a department of its host institute.
  • The hubs sit in academic institutions, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institute of Science.
  • The Centre raised its four best performing hubs to Technology Translation Research Parks.
  • They are IIT Kanpur for cyber-security, IISc Bengaluru for robotics and artificial intelligence, IIT (ISM) Dhanbad for mining and IIT Indore for digital health.
  • The reward for a strong hub is a wider mandate rather than only more money.

What changed

  1. 31 Aug 2026

    PIB, 31 Aug 2026: Cyber-Physical Systems mission: translation parks and BharatGen (opens in a new tab)

IndiaAI Mission

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Prelims and Mains

The IndiaAI Mission is the central programme for artificial intelligence capability, which funds indigenous foundation models, empanels compute providers to supply GPU hours, and gathers problem statements from ministries for AI solutions.

What changed

  1. 31 Aug 2026

    • A foundation model is trained once on broad data and adapted afterwards to many tasks.
    • BharatGen, led by IIT Bombay, released Param-2, a model of 17 billion parameters covering all 22 scheduled languages.

    PIB, 31 Aug 2026: Cyber-Physical Systems mission: translation parks and BharatGen (opens in a new tab)

  2. 29 Jul 2026New subject

    • Twenty indigenous model projects are being supported, 12 large and 8 small language models, including Sarvam AI's 30 billion and 105 billion parameter models and BharatGen's multilingual models.
    • On compute, 15 providers are empanelled and 93 lakh GPU hours have been sanctioned.
    • After the India AI Impact Summit of February 2026, 62 ministries listed 762 problem statements for AI solutions.

    Mains: one view is that India's opening lies in applied and multilingual systems built on its own data, and that government procurement can shape that market as public standards did for payments and identity.

    PIB, 29 Jul 2026: IndiaAI Mission Identifies 762 AI Use Cases Across 62 Ministries, Approves 58 AI Centres of Excellence and 543 Data & AI Labs (opens in a new tab) · PIB, 27 Jul 2026: India's Safe & Trusted AI Pillar Powers Responsible Innovation while Shaping Global AI Governance (opens in a new tab) · Frontline, 1 Jul 2026: India is a heavy user of artificial intelligence and a light builder of it, and the case being made is that its opening lies in applied and multilingual systems rather than in frontier models. (opens in a new tab)

Also filed elsewhere

  • India's research spending · on Research funding, institutions and awards

    For the first time the larger half of India's research bill is paid by private industry rather than by government.