India’s artificial intelligence mission is entering a major new phase with the government selecting eight organisations to build home-grown large language models under the IndiaAI Mission. Announcing the decision at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on September 18, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw confirmed that the selected entities include IIT Bombay, Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics, Avataar AI, Zeinteiq Aitech Innovations, Genloop Intelligence, NeuroDX (Intellihealth) and Shodh AI.
The most ambitious of these projects will be led by IIT Bombay through its BharatGen consortium. The institute has been assigned the task of developing a trillion-parameter large language model, which will make it one of the most advanced AI models being developed anywhere in the world. The IndiaAI Mission has sanctioned financial support worth Rs 988.6 crore for this project.
Parameters in AI are internal variables that enable models to recognise patterns and process language. The higher the parameter count, the greater the model’s sophistication. For India, creating a trillion-parameter model marks a significant step in building sovereign AI capabilities and strengthening its position in global AI research.
Tech Mahindra, one of the chosen organisations, said it was “proud to be recognised” as part of the Mission. Highlighting its progress on its in-house Indic model, Project Indus, the company stated, “This announcement comes on the back of building our own and India’s own Indic LLM, Project Indus. Built completely in-house and at frugal cost, the journey of having Project Indus as open source to creating sovereign LLMs has been a learning and rewarding experience.”
This announcement builds on earlier selections. In May 2025, SoketAI, Gnani.ai, and Gan AI were chosen to create India’s first foundational models, while four other startups, including Sarvam AI, were identified earlier for specialised AI systems. To support all the selected entities, the government has worked with cloud and data providers to expand access to GPUs, which are critical for training large AI models.
Minister Vaishnaw said the progress so far has been encouraging. “The models that were selected earlier are progressing really well and I am confident that by the time the AI Impact Summit gets underway in February 2026, India will have a model or models ready,” he said.
He also confirmed that a national AI framework will be released soon. Prepared jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, the framework will provide guidance on building and deploying AI responsibly in India.
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