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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
Showing 2 of 3 subjects, those that changed from 16 to 31 August 2026.Show all
The Cyber-Physical Systems mission
Copy link to The Cyber-Physical Systems missionPrelims 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
IndiaAI Mission
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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
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.
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.