India's IT Ministry Plans AI Agents for DigiLocker, UMANG

India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has initiated a tender process aimed at developing and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) agents within critical digital citizen services, including DigiLocker and the UMANG application.

The ministry issued a Request for Empanelment (RFE) on August 7, 2026, seeking AI-capable agencies to supply AI/ML professionals for a "Unified AI Team." This team will be responsible for designing, developing, and implementing AI-driven services across various government digital platforms.

The scope of work for the selected agencies includes setting up inference servers for open-source large language models (LLMs), building predictive analytics and decision intelligence models, developing computer vision capabilities for document processing, and creating multilingual chatbots and voice assistants. Services also encompass generative AI and LLM engineering, data engineering, and MLOps, alongside adherence to responsible AI and governance principles.

The tender outlines specific AI services to be developed, such as document summarization and classification, multilingual conversational AI chatbots, voice-based form filling and web navigation, optical character recognition (OCR) for documents, and live face detection for identity verification. AI agents will be built for government applications like DigiLocker to automate workflows, manage API calls securely, and ensure human oversight for critical actions.

NeGD intends to establish an in-house server for deploying open-source models. The system architecture will support both commercial and open-source models, ensuring data security and compliance with local data residency requirements.