India has launched an ambitious strategy to achieve technological independence in artificial intelligence, focusing on domestically developed AI models and infrastructure. The Indian government announced the Bhashini Digital India AI Mission programme on June 15, 2025, which allocates $12 billion (1 trillion rupees) investment over the next five years in AI research and development, infrastructure, and talent cultivation. The initiative aims to transform India into a global AI powerhouse by 2030, becoming independent from foreign technologies, while placing at the centre of development AI solutions that operate in the country's twenty-two official languages, making the benefits of technology accessible to its 1.4 billion population.
Indian efforts are built on three main pillars: developing proprietary large language models (LLMs), establishing domestic computing infrastructure, and training specialised workforce. According to Technology Review, India is currently working on deploying 50,000 GPU processors under the Bhashini programme, specifically for training AI models, and this capacity will expand to 150,000 units by 2027. The state-developed language model called Bharat GPT already operates in twenty-two Indian languages and has been trained on more than 100,000 hours of speech data and 2 million images to accurately handle Indian cultural and linguistic specificities, unlike Western models. According to data from India's Ministry of Investment and Internal Trade, the country's AI sector was worth $3.5 billion in 2023 and with an annual growth rate of 25-35%, could reach $7.8 billion by 2025, significantly contributing to India's goal of becoming a $1 trillion digital economy by 2030.
The uniqueness of India's AI strategy lies in its inclusive approach, targeting not only the urban, English-speaking population but also rural citizens who speak only local languages. According to Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India's Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, the country's AI development is not only economically but strategically important, and the government has created ten thousand special AI scholarships and established ten centres of excellence in different parts of the country. Based on the Invest India report, the Indian AI ecosystem already encompasses more than 3,000 active startups, many of which offer solutions in agriculture, healthcare, and education accessible in local languages, while the government's DigiYatra programme has already served 50 million passengers with facial recognition technology at fourteen airports, demonstrating the successful practical application of AI in public services.
Sources:
1.
Invest India · 2025
2.
Shadma Shaikh
3.
Press Information Bureau ·
