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India's AI capability

India is building artificial intelligence (AI) as public infrastructure rather than as a product: a language platform in BHASHINI, a publicly funded foundation model in Param-2, and a mission that has begun turning university hubs into translation parks. What it has less of is the innovation system that frontier models come out of, and the talent pipeline narrows at every step for women.

UPSC has asked

Prelims 2026: how large language models work
Prelims 2025: the AI Action Summit at Paris and its predecessors

BHASHINI, the language platform

36Indian text languages

23Indian voice languages

35international languages

800+government websites powered

From Press Information Bureau (PIB) releases, September 2026

BHASHINI (Bhasha Interface for India) runs under the Digital India Corporation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
BhashaDaan crowdsources speech, text and image data for it.
Shrutlekh uses natural language processing for real time translation and transcription.

The Cyber-Physical Systems mission

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 (IISc).

Who builds it

Women's share, stage by stage

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates43 per cent
Technology workforce26 per cent
Advanced artificial intelligence roles12 per cent
Senior artificial intelligence leadership10 per cent

From the Indian Express column of 19 August 2026

The IndiaAI Mission is the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's programme for computing capacity, datasets, skills and safe and trusted artificial intelligence.
Only 57 per cent of women have independent internet access, against 72 per cent of men.

Foundation model: A large artificial intelligence model trained on broad data that can then be adapted to many tasks, such as a large language model.

Parameter: One of the numbers inside a model that training adjusts; the count of parameters is a rough measure of how large the model is.

Natural language processing: The branch of artificial intelligence that lets computers understand and generate human language, spoken or written.

Cyber-Physical System: A system in which software, sensors and networks control a physical process, as in a driverless car or an automated factory line.

Section 8 company: A company registered under Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013 for a charitable or public purpose, which must apply its income to those objects instead of paying dividends.

Scheduled languages: The 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.

Algorithmic bias: Systematic unfairness in an artificial intelligence system's outputs, coming from skewed or incomplete training data or from the design choices made around it.

Patient capital: Money invested with no expectation of an early return, so that it can fund work whose payoff is years away.

What has happened

10 Sep 2026
BHASHINI carried its voice first technology abroad and into the States.
- BHASHINI Sangam, its international workshop, was held in Kathmandu on 1 September to widen work with Nepal.
- Maharashtra discussed a proposed MahaBHASHINI at a workshop in the State secretariat on 10 September.
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) · 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)
31 Aug 2026
The Centre raised the four best performing hubs of the mission 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.
- BharatGen, led by IIT Bombay, released Param-2, a foundation 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)
19 Aug 2026
A column set out how India's artificial intelligence workforce narrows at every step for women.
- Algorithmic bias from skewed or incomplete training data can disadvantage women in credit scoring and in maternal health tools.
- It argues that women must take part under the IndiaAI Mission as researchers, engineers and policymakers, not only as users.
Indian Express, 19 Aug 2026: To build AI for all, India must build it with all (opens in a new tab)
14 Aug 2026
The Indian Institute of Science 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)
6 Aug 2026
A column argued that leadership in frontier artificial intelligence comes from a national innovation system rather than from a funding announcement.
- Such a system rests on universities, advanced mathematics, semiconductor fabrication, high performance computing, energy and patient capital.
- OpenAI and DeepSeek are outcomes of ecosystems their countries built over decades, and cannot be copied with money alone.
- It asks whether Indian universities host frontier laboratories, whether doctoral talent is retained, and whether firms build chips and foundation models rather than only applications.
The Indian Express, 6 Aug 2026: India cannot afford to nurse delusions of AI grandeur (opens in a new tab)