Govt to shortlist eight more firms under extension of the IndiaAI Mission

India will be expanding its ₹1,500 crore IndiaAI Mission by shortlisting around eight firms to build foundational AI models. BharatGen’s Param-1 may be among the new beneficiaries as GPU supply challenges test the programme’s ability to scale. BharatGen is a government-backed consortium anchored by IIT Bombay, which recently released a bilingual foundation model called Param-1 (about 2.9 billion parameters and trained on large English–Hindi corpora).

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw is expected to formally announce the second-round beneficiaries next week. The IndiaAI Mission announced by MeitY supports organisations to help build foundational models from the ground up, via grants, compute credits and other support.

The call for proposals attracted hundreds of applications earlier this year.

This is the second phase of approvals after an initial cohort. Earlier in the mission Sarvam, Soket Labs, Gnani.ai and Gan.ai were approved to receive subsidised GPU compute and other assistance to develop indigenous models.

The new round will broaden that group if finalized as expected.

The mission has empaneled cloud and GPU-as-a-service providers to run a common compute facility intended to make GPU hours available at subsidized rates, a central plank of the ₹1,500 crore support plan. Officials say the facility is designed to democratize access for startups, academia and researchers while keeping costs low.