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AI and robotics: technology and India's capability

Artificial intelligence and robotics as national capability: 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.

Foundation note: How a large language model works

UPSC has asked

Prelims 2020: what artificial intelligence can effectively do at present

Showing 3 of 3 articles, those that changed from 1 to 31 August 2026.Show all

BHASHINI

Prelims and Mains

Bhasha Interface for India (BHASHINI) is the platform built to solve, once for everybody, the problem of India's languages, the first problem any Indian artificial intelligence service has to solve.

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.
It runs under the Digital India Corporation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
BhashaDaan crowdsources speech, text and image data for it, and Shrutlekh uses natural language processing for real time translation and transcription.
It carries 36 Indian text languages and 23 Indian voice languages, and powers over 800 government websites.

What changed

14 Aug 2026BriefThe Indian Institute of Science (IISc) released SraVaani, a free and open source speech recognition model covering 65 Indian languages and dialects. It reaches 20 scheduled languages and 45 regional languages and dialects, over 40 of them unsupported until now, 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

Prelims and Mains

The National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) funds India's work where software drives machinery, and is also where much of its artificial intelligence research sits.

It was launched in 2018 for nine years and spends through 25 Technology Innovation Hubs rather than through its own departments.
Each hub is registered as a Section 8 company rather than run as a department of its host institute.

What changed

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

IndiaAI Mission

Prelims and Mains

The IndiaAI Mission is the central programme for artificial intelligence capability.

It funds indigenous foundation models, empanels compute providers to supply GPU hours, and gathers problem statements from ministries for AI solutions.
Its outlay is over ₹10,372 crore, and its shared compute facility holds over 45,000 graphics processing units.
AI Kosh carries its datasets.

What changed

31 Aug 2026BriefA 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)

Show history (1 other update)

29 Jul 2026New
- Indigenous model projects are being supported, including Sarvam AI's 30 billion and 105 billion parameter models and BharatGen's multilingual models.
- After the India AI Impact Summit of February 2026, ministries listed 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
India's research spending is its gross expenditure on research and development (GERD), paid by government and by private industry.