A meeting called by MeitY earlier this week was attended by close to 300, mostly startups, researchers, academics and students, all keen to work on the project, encouraged by the government’s offer of Rs 1,500 crore (about $173 million) support and subsidised computing power.
Many have drawn inspiration from China’s DeepSeek, with its claimed shoe-string budget of $5.6 million.
The ministry will accept proposals till the 15th of every month for the next six months, or till it collects enough proposals, whichever is earlier. The first deadline is Saturday.
“This is a good opportunity to develop native AI capabilities,” said Gupta, whose startup Genloop has presence in New Delhi and San Francisco.
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Genloop is working on an India-specific compliance large language model (LLM). It will be pre-trained with Indian cultural context, history and policies, sourced from domestic websites, Parliament proceedings, open-source datasets, legal judgements, newspapers, regional cinema and social media feeds, he said.Level playing field
The LLM will support the 22 scheduled Indian languages, said Gupta of Genloop. While his budget is yet to be finalised, it may cost him about $1.5 million, said the 30-year-old.
According to startup founders, compute is the costliest component in developing an AI model. With that being taken care of with the government’s offer of subsidised access to over 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), it is a level playing field for them with some highly funded companies such as Sarvam AI, which has raised a total of $53.6 million to date.
EJY Health, founded by Kirti, is testing its model. “We are conducting the pilot in five hospitals in Patna. Three are government hospitals, while two are private,” the 29-year-old said.
The startup, incubated at IIT-Patna and supported by the Startup Bihar initiative, aims to submit a proposal to the IndiaAI Mission by March 15. “Our solution is designed to enhance the efficiency and productivity of nurses, doctors and hospital administrators. Currently, 60% of their time is spent on documentation. Our AI model will reduce this to 20%, allowing healthcare professionals to spend 40% more time on patient care, thereby reducing burnout and improving overall healthcare delivery,” Kirti explained.
Gurgaon’s Gulati, 25, offers tech solutions through his startup EliteNotes, but has no formal tech education. His one-and-a-half-year-old company too is building an AI-driven enterprise platform to enhance multitasking across workflow applications.
“For the IndiaAI Mission, we’d like to build a multilingual multimodal small language model. It would support audio and video in multiple Indian languages. We will be submitting our proposal by March 15,” he said.
India may take nine to 12 months to build its own sovereign AI foundation model, Abhishek Singh, the IndiaAI Mission chief executive and an additional secretary at MeitY, told the meeting on February 11.
IndiaAI Mission adviser Aakrit Vaish told the attendees that the funding would be in the form of grants, compute credits, or staggered equity funding.
The team’s expertise and track record when it comes to research, development and deployment; approach in building the model, unique angle and data strategy are among essential eligibility criteria, the officials said.