Government disburses ₹276 Cr for four AI Centres of Excellence

The Union government has disbursed a total of ₹276.1 crore (approximately $33 million USD) to establish four national Centres of Excellence (CoE) in artificial intelligence, Minister of State for Education Sukanta Majumdar informed Parliament. The AI CoEs are being set up at IIT Ropar, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore, and IIT Madras.

Funds have been released to the institutions since March 2025, with IIT Kanpur receiving ₹74.39 crore, IIT Ropar ₹62.64 crore, IISc Bangalore ₹69.07 crore, and IIT Madras ₹43 crore. An additional ₹27 crore was allocated during a pilot phase between March 2023 and March 2025 for the selection of these institutions.

These centers are part of the government's initiative to "Make AI in India and Make AI work for India." Three of these CoEs are focusing on agriculture, sustainable cities, and healthcare. The AI CoE at IIT Madras is developing machine learning models for automatic speech recognition, optical character recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech, with a focus on Indic languages.

The AI CoE for agriculture at IIT Ropar is working on models for crop, pest, and disease identification. Meanwhile, the AI CoE for sustainable cities at IIT Kanpur is developing large language models for air pollution attribution and urban flood prediction. The progress and fund utilization at these centers are monitored through a layered governance and financial oversight mechanism.

This initiative is a component of India's broader strategy to foster an indigenous AI ecosystem. The government aims to enhance access to computing infrastructure, support AI startups, and develop domestic large language models. The overall goal is to position India as a significant global player in the field of artificial intelligence.